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THE PUPPET SHOW 
OF MEMORY 



BY 

MAURICE BARING 



BOSTON 
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1922 












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NOTE 

MY thanks are due to Messrs. Methuen for allowing 
me to use in Chapters XVI.-XIX. some matter 
which has already appeared in A Year in Russia 
and Russian Essays, two books published by them ; to 
Mr. Leo Maxe for allowing me to use an article on 
Sarah Bernhardt which appeared in the National Review, 
and has been re-written for this book ; to Father C. C. 
Martindale and Mr. Desmond McCarthy for kindly cor- 
recting the proofs. 

M. B. 



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J. 




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CONTENTS 



CHAP. 




PAGE 


I. 


The Nursery 


I 


II. 


The Nursery and the Schoolroom . 


14 


III. 


Membland ... . . 


31 


IV. 


Membland . ... 


46 


V. 


School 


68 


VI. 


Eton . 


87 


VII. 


Germany ..... 


118 


VIII. 


Italy, Cambridge, Germany, London 


138 


IX. 


Oxford and Germany . 


165 


X. 


Paris 


181 


XL 


Copenhagen 


208 


XII. 


Sarah Bernhardt 


227 


XIII. 


Rome ...... 


245 


XIV. 


Russia and Manchuria . 


263 


XV. 


Battles ...... 


287 


XVI. 


London, Manchuria, Russia 


305 


XVII. 


Russia : The Beginning of the Revolution 


33^ 


XVIII. 


St. Petersburg ..... 


356 


XIX. 


Travel in Russia ..... 


367 


XX. 


South Russia, Journalism, London . 


386 


XXI. 


Constantinople (1909) 


397 


XXII. 


The Balkan War, 1912 .... 


406 


XXIII. 


Constantinople once more (1912) 


418 


XXIV. 


The Fascination of Russia . . . . 


43o 




Index ....... 


439 



THE 

PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 



CHAPTER I 
THE NURSERY 

WHEN people sit down to write their recollections 
they exclaim with regret, " If only I had kept a 
diary, what a rich store of material I should now 
have at my disposal ! " I remember one of the masters at 
Eton telling me, when I was a boy, that if I wished to make a 
fortune when I was grown up, I had only to keep a detailed 
diary of every day of my life at Eton. He said the same thing 
to all the boys he knew, but I do not remember any boy of my 
generation taking his wise advice. 

On the other hand, for the writer who wishes to recall past 
memories, the absence of diaries and notebooks has its com- 
pensations. Memory, as someone has said, is the greatest of 
artists. It eliminates the unessential, and chooses with careless 
skill the sights and the sounds and the episodes that are best 
worth remembering and recording. The first thing I can 
remember is a Christmas tree which I think celebrated the 
Christmas of 1876. It was at-Shoreham in Kent, at a house 
belonging to Mr. F. B. Mildmay, who married one of my mother's 
sisters. I was two years old, and I remember my Christmas 
present, a large bird with yellow and red plumage, which for a 
long time afterwards lived at the top of the nursery wardrobe. 
It was neither a bird of Paradise nor a pheasant ; possibly only 
a somewhat flamboyant hen ; but I loved it dearly, and it 
irradiated the nursery to me for at least two years. 

The curtain then falls and rises again on the nursery of 
37 Charles Street, Berkeley Square, London. The nursery 



2 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

epoch, which lasted till promotion to the schoolroom and lessons 
began, seems to children as long as a lifetime, just as houses 
and places seem to them infinitely large. The nursery was on 
the third floor of the house, and looked out on to the street. 

I There was a small night -nursery next door to it, which had 

f coloured pictures of St. Petersburg on the wall. 

I can remember the peculiar roar of London in those days J 
the four-wheelers and hansoms rattling on the macadam pave- 
ment through the fog, except when there was straw down in 
the street for some sick person ; and the various denizens of 
the streets, the lamplighter and the muffin-man ; often a 
barrel-organ, constantly in summer a band, and sometimes a 
Punch and Judy. During the war, when the streets began to 
be darkened, but before the final complete darkness set in in 
1917, London looked at night very much as it was in my child- 
hood. But the strange rumbling noise had gone for ever. 
Sometimes on one of the houses opposite there used to be an 
heraldic hatchment. The nursery was inhabited by my brother 
Hugo and myself, our nurse, Hilly, and two nurserymaids, 
Grace Hetherington, and Annie. Grace was annexed by me ; 
Annie by Hugo. Hilly had been nurse to my sisters and, I 
think, to my elder brothers too. She had the slightly weather- 
beaten but fresh agelessness of Nannies, and her most violent 
threat was : " I'll bring my old shoe to you," and one of her 
most frequent exclamations : " Oh, you naughty boy, you very 
naughty boy ! " The nursery had Landseer pictures in gilt 
frames, and on the chest of drawers between the two windows 
a mechanical toy of an entrancing description. It was a square 
box, one side of which was made of glass, and behind this glass 
curtain, on a small platform, a lady sat dressed in light blue 
silk at an open spinet ; a dancing master, in a red silk doublet 
with a powdered wig and yellow satin knee-breeches, on one 
side of it, conducted, and in the foreground a little girl in short 
skirts of purple gauze covered with spangles stood ready to 
dance. When you wound up the toy, the lady played, the man 
conducted elegantly with an open score in one hand and a 
baton in the other, and the little girl pirouetted. It only 
played one short, melancholy, tinkling, but extremely refined 
dance-tune. 

At one of the top windows of the house opposite, a little 
girl used to appear sometimes. Hugo and I used to exchange 



THE NURSERY 3 

signals with her, and we called her Miss Rose. Our mute 
acquaintance went on for a long time, but we never saw her 
except across the street and at her window. We did not wish 
to see more of her. Nearer acquaintance would have marred 
the perfect romance of the relation. 

There were two forms of light refreshment peculiar to 
the nursery, and probably to all nurseries : one was Albert 
biscuits, and the other toast-in-water. Children call for an 
Albert biscuit as men ask for a whisky-and-soda at a club, 
not from hunger, but as an adjunct to conversation and a 
break in monotony. At night, after we had gone to bed, we 
used often to ask monotonously and insistently for a drink of 
water. " Hilly, I want a drink of water " ; but this meant, 
not that one was thirsty, but that one was frightened and 
wanted to see a human being. All my brothers and sisters, 
I found out afterwards, had done the same thing in the same 
way, and for the same reason, but the tradition had been 
handed down quite unconsciously. I can't remember how the 
nursery epoch came to an end ; it merges in my memory, 
without any line of division, into the schoolroom period ; but 
the first visits in the country certainly belonged to the nursery 
epoch. 

We used to go in the summer to Coombe Cottage, near 
Maiden, an ivy-covered, red-brick house, with a tower at one 
end, a cool oak hall and staircase, a drawing-room full of water- 
colours, a room next to it full of books, with a drawing-table 
and painting materials ready, and a long dining-room, of which 
the narrow end was a sitting-room, and had a verandah looking 
out on to the garden. There was also a large fruit garden, 
lawns, a dairy, a deaf-and-dumb gardener who spoke on his 
fingers, a farmyard, and a duck-pond into which I remember 
falling. 

Coombe was an enchanted spot for us. My recollection of 
it is that of a place where it was always summer and where the 
smell of summer and the sounds of summer evening used to 
make the night-nursery a fairy place; and sometimes in the 
morning, red-coated soldiers used to march past playing " The 
Girl I left behind me," with a band of drums and fifes. The 
uniforms of the soldiers were as bright as the poppies in the 
field, and that particular tune made a lasting impression on me. 
I never forgot it. I can remember losing my first front tooth 



4 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

at Coombe by tying it on to a thread and slamming the door, 
and I can remember my sisters singing, "Where are you going 
to, my pretty Maid ? " one of them acting the milkmaid, with 
a wastepaper basket under her arm for a pail. Best of all, I 
remember the garden, the roses, the fruit, trying to put salt 
on a bird's tail for the first time, and the wonderful games in 
the hayfields. 

We are probably all of us privileged at least once or twice 
in our lives to experience the indescribable witchery of a perfect 
summer night, when time seems to stand still, the world becomes 
unsubstantial, and Nature is steeped in music and silver light, 
quivering shadows and mysterious sound, when such a pitch 
of beauty and glamour and mystery is achieved by the darkness, 
the landscape, the birds, the insects, the trees and the shadows, 
and perhaps the moon or even one star, that one would like to 
say to the fleeting moment what Faust challenged and defied 
the devil to compel him to cry out : " Verweile, Du bist schon." 

It is the moment that the great poets have sometimes caught 
and made permanent for us by their prodigious con jury : Shake- 
speare, in the end of the Merchant of Venice, when Lorenzo and 
Jessica let the sounds of music creep into their ears, and 
wonder at patines of bright gold in the floor of heaven ; Keats, 
when he wished to cease upon the midnight with no pain ; 
Musset, in the " Nuit de Mai " ; Victor Hugo, when, on their 
lovely brief and fatal bridal night, Hernani and Dona Sol fancy 
in the moonlight that sleeping Nature is watching amorously 
over them ; and the musicians speak this magic with an even 
greater certainty, without the need of words : Beethoven, in 
his Sonata ; Chopin, again and again ; Schumann, in his lyrics, 
especially " Fruhlingsnacht " ; Schubert, in his " Serenade." 

I have known many such nights : the dark nights of Central' 
: Russia before the harvest ends, when the watchman's rattle 
punctuates and intensifies the huge silence, and a far-off stamp- 
ing dance rhythm and a bleating accordion outdo Shakespeare 
and Schubert in magic ; June nights in Florence, when you 
couldn't see the grass for fireflies, and the croaking of frogs 
made a divine orchestra ; or in Venice, on the glassy lagoon, 
when streaks of red still hung in the west ; May nights by the 
Neckar at Heidelberg, loud with the jubilee of nightingales 
and aromatic with lilac ; a twilight in May at Arundel Park, 
when large trees, dim lawns, and antlered shapes seemed to be 



THE NURSERY 5 

part of a fairy revel ; and nights in South Devon, when the 
full September moon made the garden and the ilex tree as 
Unreal as Prospero's island. 

But I never in my whole life felt the spell so acutely as in 
the summer evenings in the night nursery at Coombe Cottage, 
when we went to bed by daylight and lay in our cots guessing 
at the pattern on the wall, to wake up later when it was dark, 
half conscious of the summer scents outside, and of a bird's 
song in the darkness. The intense magic of that moment I 
have never quite recaptured, except when reading Keats' " Ode 
to the Nightingale " for the first time, when the door on to the 
past was opened wide once more and the old vision and the 
strange sense of awe, unreality, and enchantment returned. 

But to go back to nursery life. Our London life followed 
the ritual, I suppose, of most nurseries. In the morning after 
our breakfast we went down, washed and scrubbed and starched, 
into the dining-room, where breakfast was at nine, and kissed 
our father before he drove to the city in a phaeton, and played 
at the end of the dining-room round a pedestalled bust of one 
of the Popes. Then a walk in the Park, and sometimes as a 
treat a walk in the streets, and possibly a visit to Cremer's, the 
toy-shop in Bond Street. Hugo and I detested the Park, and 
the only moment of real excitement I remember was when one 
day Hilly told me not to go near the flower-beds, and I climbed 
over the little railing and picked a towering hyacinth. Police 
intervention was immediately threatened, and I think a police- 
man actually did remonstrate ; but although I felt for some 
hours a pariah and an outcast, there was none the less an after- 
taste of triumph in the tears ; attrition, perhaps, but no con- 
trition. 

When we got to be a little older . . . older than what ? I 
don't know . . . but there came our moment when we joined 
our sisters every morning to say our prayers in my mother's 
bedroom, every day before breakfast. They were short and 
simple prayers — the " Our Father " and one other short prayer. 
Nevertheless, for years the " Our Father " was to me a mysterious 
and unintelligible formula, all the more so, as I said it entirely 
by the sound, and not at all by the sense, thinking that 
" Whichartinheaven " was one word and " Thykingdomcome " 
another. I never asked what it meant. I think in some dim 
way I felt that, could I understand it, something of its value 



6 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

as an invocation would be lost or diminished. I also remember 
learning at a very early age the hymn, " There is a green hill 
far away," and finding it puzzling. I took it for granted 
that most green hills had city walls round them, though this 
particular one hadn't. Besides going to Coombe we went at 
the end of the summer to Devonshire, to Membland, near the 
villages of Noss, Mayo, and Newton, and not far from the river 
Yealm, an arm of the sea. It was when getting ready for the 
first of these journeys that I remember, while I was being 
dressed in the nursery, my father's servant, Mr. Deacon, came 
up to the nursery and asked me whether I would like a ticket. 
He then gave me a beautiful green ticket with a round hole in 
it. I asked him what one could do with it, and he said, " In 
return for that ticket you can get Bath buns, Banbury cakes, 
jam-rolls, crackers, and pork sausages." In the bustle of 
departure I lost it. Paddington Station resounded with the 
desperate cries of the bereaved ticket -holder. In vain I was 
given half a white first-class ticket. In vain Mr. Bullock, the 
guard, offered every other kind of ticket. It was not the same 
thing. That ticket, with the round hole, had conjured up 
visions of wonderful possibilities and fantastic exchanges. 
Sausages and Banbury cakes and Bath buns (all of them magic 
things), I knew, would be forthcoming to no other ticket. The 
loss was irreparable. I remember thinking the grown-up people 
so utterly wanting in understanding when they said : " A ticket ? 
Of course, he can have a ticket. Here's a ticket for the dear 
little boy." As if that white ticket was anything like the 
unique passport to gifts new and unheard of, anything like 
that real green ticket with the round hole in it. At the end of 
one of these journeys, at Kingsbridge Road, the train ran off the 
line. We were in a saloon carriage, and I remember the accident 
being attributed to that fact by my mother's maid, who said 
saloon carriages were always unsafe. It turned out to be an 
enjoyable accident, and we all got out and I was given an 
orange. 

Mr. Bullock, the guard, was a great friend of all of us children ; 
and our chief pleasure was to ask him a riddle : " Why is it 
dangerous to go out in the spring ? " I will leave it to the 
reader to guess the answer, with merely this as a guide, that the 
first part of the answer to the riddle is " Because the hedges are 
shooting," and the second part of the answer is peculiarly 



THE NURSERY 7 

appropriate to Mr. Bullock. I am afraid Mr. Bullock never 
saw why, although no doubt he enjoyed the riddle. 

I have already said that I cannot fix any line of division 
between the nursery and the schoolroom epochs, but before I 
get on to the subject of the schoolroom I will record a few things 
which must have belonged to the pre-schoolroom period. 

One incident which stands out clearly in my mind is that of 
the fifty-shilling train. There were at that time in London 
two toy-shops called Cremer. One was in New Bond Street, 
No. 27, I think, near Tessier's, the jeweller ; another in Regent 
Street, somewhere between Liberty's and Piccadilly Circus. 

In the window of the Regent Street shop there was a long 
train with people in it, and it was labelled fifty shillings. In the 
year 1921 it is only a small mechanical train that can be bought 
for fifty shillings. I can't remember whether I had reached 
the schoolroom when this happened, but I know I still wore a 
frock and had not yet reached the dignity of trousers. I used 
constantly to ask to go and look at this shop window and gaze 
at the fifty-shilling train, which seemed first to be miraculous 
for its size, and, secondly, for its price. Who in the world could 
have fifty shillings all at once ? 

I never went so far as thinking it was possible to possess 
that train ; but I used to wonder whether there were people 
in the world who could store up fifty shillings. We were each 
of us given sixpence every Saturday, but it was always spent 
at once, nor could I calculate or even conceive how long it 
would take to save enough sixpences to make fifty shillings. 

One evening, when we were at Coombe, in the summer, I was 
sent for to the drawing-room and then told to go into the dining- 
room. I opened the door, and there, on the floor, was the fifty- 
shilling train. If a fairy had flown into the room and lifted me 
to the ceiling I could not have thought a fact more miraculous. 
From that moment I knew for certain that miracles could 
happen and do happen, and subsequent experience has con- 
firmed the belief. Alas ! the funnel of the engine was soon 
broken, and Mr. Toombs, the carpenter, was said to be able to 
mend it, and I looked forward to another miracle. He did, 
but in a way which was hardly satisfactory considered as a 
miracle, although perfect for practical usage. He turned 
on a lathe a solid funnel made of black wood, but not hollow, 
and he stuck it in where the funnel ought to be. I pretended 



8 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

I was satisfied, but my private belief was that Mr. Toombs 
didn't know how to make funnels. 

Another thing which happened when I was six years old 
was a visit to the Drury Lane pantomime, which was Mother 
Goose. This, of course, with a transformation scene with a 
large fairy with moving emerald butterfly-like wings and Arthur 
Roberts who, when playing a trumpet, spat out all his teeth on 
to the floor as if they were an encumbrance, was an ecstasy 
beyond words. 

Another event almost more exciting was the arrival of a 
doll's house. I played with dolls, but not as girls do, mothering 
them and dressing them. Mine were little tiny dolls, and could 
not be dressed or undressed, and they were used as puppets. I 
made them open Parliament, act plays and stories, and most 
frequently take the part of the French Merovingian kings. 
This was at the beginning of the schoolroom period, and the 
dolls were called Chilperic, Ermengarde, Clothilde, Blanche de 
Castille, Fredegonde, Brunehaut, Galswinthe, and Pepin le Bref, 
and other names belonging to the same remote period of history. 
One day I was told that a doll's house was coming. I couldn't 
sleep for excitement, and Hilly, Grace, and Annie gravely held 
a conclave one night when I was in bed and supposed to be 
asleep, over their supper, and said that so exciting a thing as a 
doll's house ought not to be allowed me. It would ruin my 
health. I feigned deep sleep, and the next day pretended to 
have lost all interest in dolls' houses, but when it came, all its 
furniture was taken out, put on the floor, and arranged in two 
long rows, with a throne at one end, to enable Chilperic and 
Fredegonde to open Parliament. 

One year in London I actually saw Queen Victoria drive to 
the opening of Parliament in a gilded coach with a little crown 
perched on her head and an ermine tippet. It was not quite a 
satisfactory crown, but still it was a crown, and the coach had 
the authentic Cinderella quality. 

To go back to the dolls for a moment. I used to go to 
Membland sometimes for Easter with my father and mother 
when the rest of the family stayed in London, and Margaret 
used to write me letters from the dolls, beginning " Cher Papa " 
and ending " Ermengarde " or " Chilperic," as the case might 
be. These letters used to cover me with confusion and morti- 
fication before the grown-up people, as I kept it a secret that I 



THE NURSERY 9 

ever played with dolls, knowing it to be thought rather eccentric' 
and liable to be misunderstood, especially when there were 
other boys about, which there were. 

Of course, in the nursery, Hugo and I had endless games of 
pretending, especially during bath-time (baths were hip-baths), 
and I remember Hugo refusing to have his bath because when 
we were playing at fishes I seized the shark's part and wouldn't 
let him be a shark. " Hilly," he wailed, " I will be a shark." 
But no, I wouldn't hear of it, and he had to be a whale, which 
the shark, so I said, easily mastered. 

Promotion to the schoolroom meant lessons and luncheon 
downstairs. The schoolroom was inhabited by my three 
sisters, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Susan, and ruled over by the 
French governess, Cherie. I thought Cherie the most beautiful, 
the cleverest, and altogether the most wonderful person in the 
world. My earliest recollection of her almost magical powers 
was when she took a lot of coloured silks and put them behind 
a piece of glass and said this was une vision. I believed 
there was nothing she didn't know and nothing she couldn't 
do. I was also convinced that one day I would marry her. 
This dream was sadly marred by the conduct of my sister 
Elizabeth. Elizabeth was the eldest, Margaret the second, and 
Susan the third, of my sisters. I firmly believed in fairies. 
Elizabeth and Margaret fostered the belief by talking a great 
deal about their powers as fairies, and Elizabeth said she was 
Queen of the fairies. One day she said : " Just as you are 
going to be married to Cherie, and when you are in church, I 
will turn you into a frog." This was said in the schoolroom in 
London. The schoolroom was on the floor over the nursery. 
No sooner had Elizabeth made this ominous remark when I 
ran to the door and howled in a manner which penetrated the 
whole house from the housemaids' rooms upstairs to the house- 
keeper's room in the basement. Screams and yells startled the 
whole house. Hilly came rushing from the nursery; Cherie 
came from her bedroom, where she had been doing some sewing ; 
Dimmock, my mother's maid, whom we called D., came down- 
stairs, saying : " Well, I never " ; Sheppy, the housekeeper, peered 
upwards from the subterranean housekeeper's room ; and, lastly, 
my mother came from the drawing-room. The cause of the 
crisis was explained by me through sobs. " She says "... 
sob, sob, yell ..." that she's a fairy "... sob, sob . . . 



io THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

" and that she'll turn me into a frog " . . . sob, sob . . . "when 
I marry Cherie. . . ." All attempts to calm me were in vain. 
Elizabeth was then appealed to, and the whole house in chorus 
said to her, " Say you're not a fairy." But Elizabeth became 
marble-constant. She said, " How can I say I'm not a fairy 
when I am one ? " A statement which I felt to be all too true 
and well founded. More sobs and yells. Universal indignation 
against Elizabeth. My paroxysm was merely increased by all 
the efforts everyone made to soothe me. Elizabeth was cajoled, 
persuaded, argued with, bribed, threatened, exhorted, blamed, 
anathematised, entreated, appealed to, implored, but all in 
vain. She would not budge from her position, which was that 
she was a fairy. 

The drama proceeded. Nothing stopped the stream of 
convulsive sobs, the flood of anguish — not all Cherie's own 
assurances that the wedding would be allowed to take place. 

Elizabeth was taken downstairs to be reasoned with, and 
after an hour and a half's argument, and not before she had 
been first heavily bribed with promises and then sent to bed, 
she finally consented to compromise. She said, as a final 
concession, " I'll say I'm not a fairy, but I am." When this 
concession was wrung from her the whole relieved household 
rushed up to tell me the good news that Elizabeth had said she 
was not a fairy. The moment I heard the news my tears 
ceased, and perfect serenity was restored. But although 
Elizabeth capitulated, Margaret was firmer, and she continued 
to mutter (like Galileo) for the rest of the afternoon, " But / 
am a fairy all the same." 

Margaret was the exciting element in the schoolroom. She 
was often naughty, and I remember her looking through the 
schoolroom window at Coombe, while I was doing lessons 
with Cherie, and making faces. Cherie said to her one day : 
" Vous feriez rougir un regiment." Elizabeth was pleasantly 
frivolous, and Susan was motherly and sensible, and supposed, 
to be the image of her father, but Margaret was dramatic and 
imaginative, and invincibly obstinate. 

She knew that for Cherie's sake I didn't like admitting that 
the English had ever defeated the French in battle, so every 
now and then she would roll out lists of battles fought by the 
English against the French and won, beginning with Crecy, 
Poitiers, getting to Agincourt with a crescendo, and ending 



THE NURSERY n 

up in a tremendous climax with Waterloo. To which I used to 
retort with a battle called Bouvines, won by Philippe Auguste, 
in some most obscure period over one of the Plantagenet kings, 
and with Fontenoy. I felt them both to be poor retorts. 

Another invention of Margaret's was a mysterious person 
called Louiseaunt, who often came to see her, but as it happened 
always when we were out. If we suddenly came into the room, 
Margaret would say, " What a pity ! Louiseaunt has just been 
here. Shell be so sorry to have missed you." And try as we 
would, we always just missed Louiseaunt. 

If we went out without Margaret, Louiseaunt was sure to 
come that day. We constantly just arrived as Louiseaunt had 
left, and the inability ever to hit off Louiseaunt 's precise visiting 
hours was a lasting exasperation. 

Another powerful weapon of Margaret's was recitation. She 
used to recite in English and in French, and in both languages 
the effect on me was a purge of pity and terror. I minded most 
" Lord Ullin's Daughter," declaimed with melodramatic gesture, 
and nearly as much a passage from Hernani, beginning — 

"Monts d'Aragon! Galice ! Estramadoure ! 
Oh ! Je porte malheur a tout ce qui m'entoure ! " 

which she recited, rolling her eyes in a menacing attitude. 

" Lord Ullin's Daughter," said with the help of Susan, whose 
rendering had something reassuringly comfortable and homely 
about it — Susan couldn't say her " r's," and pronounced them like 
" w's " — in contradistinction to Margaret's sombre and vehement 
violence, did a little to mitigate the effect, but none the less it 
frightened me so much that it had to be stopped. Hugo was 
not yet in the schoolroom then. 

Lessons in London began soon after breakfast. They were 
conducted by Cherie and by an English governess, Mrs. Christie, 
who used to arrive in a four-wheeler, always the same one, from 
Kentish Town, and teach us English, Arithmetic, and Latin. 
Mrs. Christie was like the pictures of Thackeray, with spectacles, 
white bandeaux, and a black gown. During lessons she used to 
knit. She was in permanent mourning, and we knew we must 
never ask to learn " Casabianca," as her little boy who had died 
had learnt it. She used to arrive with a parcel of books from 
the London Library, done up in a leather strap. She was the 
first of a long line of teachers who failed to teach me Arithmetic. 



12 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

She used to stay the whole morning, or sometimes only part of 
it. During lessons she used to have a small collation, a glass of 
claret, and a water biscuit. She also taught other families. 

At Coombe the schoolroom looked out on the lawn, a long, flat 
lawn which went down by steps on a lower lawn, at the bottom of 
which we had our own gardens and where there was a summer- 
house. I remember sitting in the schoolroom next to Cherie 
while, with a large knitting needle, she pointed out the words pain 
and vin written large in a copy-book, with a picture of a bottle 
of red wine and a picture of a piece of bread, to show what the 
words meant, while Margaret was copying out Clarence's dream 
in a copy-book and murmuring something about skulls, and 
all the time through the window came the sound, the magic 
sound of the mowing-machine, the noise of bees, and a smell of 
summer and of hayfields. 

On certain days of the week Mademoiselle Ida Henry used to 
come and give us music lessons. Our house was saturated with 
an atmosphere of music. My mother played the violin and was 
a fine concertina player, and almost before I could walk I had 
violin lessons from no less a person than Mr. Ries. Until 
I was three I was called Sir ad, and I think my mother cherished 
the dream that I would be a violinist, but I showed no aptitude. 

My first music lesson I received from Mademoiselle Ida over 
Stanley Lucas' music shop in Bond Street. I was alone in 
London with my mother and father, one November, and I 
suppose about six. Mademoiselle Ida was very encouraging, 
and — unduly, as it turned out — optimistic, and said: "II a 
des mains faites pour jouer le piano," and soon my morceau 
was Diabelli's duets. While I was learning Diabelli's duets, 
Susan was learning a Fantasia by Mozart, which I envied without 
malice. It had one particular little run in it which I learnt to 
play with one finger. One day I played this downstairs in the 
drawing-room. A few days later Mademoiselle Ida came to 
luncheon, and my mother said : " Play that little bar out of the 
Mozart to Mademoiselle Ida." I was aghast, feeling certain, 
and quite rightly, that Mademoiselle Ida would resent my 
having encroached on a more advanced morceau, and indeed, 
as it became clear to her what the bar in question was, she at 
once said : " Je ne veux pas que tu te meles des morceaux des 
autres." That was what I had feared. My mother was quite 
unconscious of the solecism that she was committing, and 



THE NURSERY 13 

pressed me to play it. Finally I hummed the tune, which 
satisfied both parties. 

I never liked music lessons then or ever afterwards, but I 
enjoyed Mademoiselle Ida's conversation and company almost 
more than anything. Every word she ever said was treasured. 
One day she said to Mrs. Christie : " Bonjour, Madame Christe. 
J'ai bien mal a la tete." " Je suis tres fachee de le savoir, 
Mademoiselle Henri," said Mrs. Christie in icy tones, and this 
little dialogue was not destined ever to be forgotten by any 
of us. We used often afterwards to enact the scene. 

Elizabeth and Susan learnt the piano, and Margaret was 
taught the violin by Herr Ludwig, a severe German master. 
John, my eldest brother, was an accomplished pianist and 
organist ; Everard, my third brother, played the piccolo. Cecil 
sang, and my mother was always bewailing that he had not 
learnt music at Eton, because his house-master said it would be 
more useful for him to learn how to shoe a horse. This, alas ! 
did not prove to be the case, as he has seldom since had the 
opportunity of making use of his skill as a blacksmith. The 
brothers were all at Eton when I first went into the schoolroom, 
but they often used to visit us in the evening at tea-time, and 
sometimes they used to listen when Cherie read aloud after tea. 

Echoes of the popular songs of the day reached both the 
nursery and the schoolroom, and the first I can remember the 
tunes of are : " Pop goes the Weasel," which used to be sung to 
me in the nursery ; " Tommy, make room for your Uncle " ; " My 
Grandfather's Clock " ; " Little Buttercup " from Pinafore, 
which used to be played on a musical box ; " Oh where and oh 
where is my little wee Dog ? " with its haunting refrain. 

Later we used to sing in chorus and dancing a pas de trois, a 
song from a Gaiety burlesque : 

" We'll never come back any more, boys, 
We'll never come back any more." 

And, later still, someone brought back to London for Christ- 
mas the unforgettable tune of " Two Lovely Black Eyes," 
which in after-life I heard all over the world — on the lagoon 
of Venice and in the villages of Mongolia. 

One day after luncheon — on Sunday — John played the " Two 
Grenadiers " at the pianoforte, and I remember the experience 
being thrilling, if a little alarming, but a revelation, and a 
first introduction into the world of music. 



CHAPTER II 
THE NURSERY AND THE SCHOOLROOM 

LIFE was divided between London from January to 
August, then Devonshire till after Christmas. In 
the nursery and the early part of the schoolroom 
period we used to go to Coombe in the summer. Coombe 
seemed to be inextricably interwoven with London and parallel 
to it ; and I remember dinner-parties happening, and a Hun- 
garian band playing on the lawn, unless I have dreamt that. 
But there came a time, I think I must have been six or seven, 
when Coombe was sold, and we went there no more, and life 
was confined to Membland and Charles Street. London in the 
winter, and summer in Devonshire, with sometimes brief visits 
to Devonshire at Easter and Whitsuntide, and brief visits to 
London in November, when my father and mother went up by 
themselves. 

It is not any false illusion or the glamour of the past that 
makes the whole of that period of life until school-time was 
reached seem like fairyland. I thought so at the time, and 
grown-up people who came to Coombe and Membland felt, 
I think, that they had come to a place of rare and radiant 
happiness. 

But I will begin with London first. 

This was the routine of life. We all had breakfast at nine 
downstairs. I remember asking how old my father was, and 
the answer was fifty-three. As he was born in 1828 and I was 
born in 1874, 1 must have been seven years old at the time of this 
question. I always thought of my father as fifty-three years old. 
My brothers John, Cecil, and Everard were at Eton at Warre's 
House, and Hugo was five years old and still in the nursery. 

After breakfast, at about a quarter to ten, my father drove 
to the City, and he never came home to luncheon except on 
Saturdays. 



THE NURSERY AND THE SCHOOLROOM 15 

We went for a walk with Cherie, and after this lessons 
lasted from eleven, I think, till two, in the schoolroom. 

The schoolroom was a long room with three windows looking 
out on to the street. There was a cottage pianoforte at an 
angle, and in the niche of one of the windows a small table, 
where Cherie used to sit and read the Daily News in the morning. 
We each of us had a cupboard for our toys, and there were some 
tall bookcases, containing all the schoolroom books, Noel and 
Chapsal's Grammar, and many comfortable, shabby books of 
fairy-tales. We each of us had a black writing-desk, with a 
wooden seat attached to it, in which we kept our copybooks, 
and at which we did our work. A long table ran right down 
the middle of our room, where we did our lessons, either when 
everyone did them together, collectively, with Cherie, who sat 
at the head of the table, or with Mrs. Christie, who sat at one 
side of the table at the farther end. 

At two o'clock we all came down to luncheon, and as my 
mother was at home to luncheon every day, stray people used 
to drop in, and that was a great excitement, as the guests used 
to be discussed for hours afterwards in the schoolroom. 

Lady Dorothy Nevill, who lived in the same street, used 
often to come to luncheon and make paper boats for me. She 
used also to shock me by her frank expression of Tory principle, 
not to say prejudice, as we were staunch Liberals, and Lady 
Dorothy used to say that Mr. Gladstone was a dreadful man. 

Mr. Alfred Montgomery was a luncheon visitor, and one 
day Bobby Spencer, who was afterwards to be Margaret's 
husband, was subjected to a rather sharp schoolroom criticism 
owing to the height of his collars. I sometimes used to em- 
barrass Cherie by sudden interpellations. One day, when she 
had refused a dish, I said : " Prends en, Cherie, toi qui es si 
gourmande." Another day at luncheon a visitor called Colonel 
Edgecombe bet my mother a pound there would be war with 
France within three years. I expect he forgot the bet, but I 
never did. Another time my mother asked Mademoiselle Ida 
what was the most difficult piece that existed for the pianoforte, 
and Mademoiselle Ida said Liszt's " Spinnelied." My mother bet 
her a pound she would learn it in a month's time (and she did). 

There were two courses at luncheon, some meat and a sweet, 
and then cheese, and we were not allowed to have the sweet 
unless we had the meat first, but we could always have two 



16 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

helpings if we liked. After luncheon we went for another walk. 
At five there were more lessons, and then schoolroom tea, pre- 
sided over by Cherie, and after that various games and occupa- 
tions, and sometimes a visit to the drawing-room. 

There were two drawing-rooms downstairs, a front drawing- 
room with three windows looking out on to the street, and a 
back drawing-room at right angles to it. The drawing-rooms 
had a faded green silk on the walls. Over the chimney-piece 
there was a fine picture by Cuyp, which years later I saw 
in a private house in the Bois de Boulogne. The room was 
full of flowers and green Sevres china. In the back drawing- 
room there was a grand pianoforte and some bookcases, and 
beyond that a room called the gilding-room, a kind of workshop 
where my mother did gilding. I only once saw a part of the 
operation, which consisted of making size. Later on this room 
became the organ room and was enlarged. The drawing-room 
led to a small landing and a short staircase to the front hall. 
On the landing wall there was an enormous picture of Venice, 
by Birket Foster, and from this landing, when there was a 
dinner-party, we used to peer through the banisters and watch 
the guests arriving. We were especially forbidden to slide 
down the banisters, as my mother used to tell us that when she 
was a little girl she had slid down the banisters and had a terrible 
fall which had cut open her throat, so that when you put a 
spoon in her mouth it came out again through her throat. 
When Hugo, the last of the family to be told this story, heard 
it, he said, " Did you die ? " And my mother was obliged to 
say that she did not. 

On the ground floor was a room looking out into the street, 
called the library, but it only possessed two bookcases let into 
Louis xv. white walls, and this led into the dining-room, beyond 
which was my father's dressing-room, where, when we were 
quite small, we would watch him shave in the morning. 

Dinner downstairs was at eight, and when we were small I 
was often allowed to go down to the beginning of dinner and 
draw at the dinner-table on a piece of paper, and the girls used 
to come down to dessert, bringing an occupation such as needle- 
work. We were always supposed to have an occupation when we 
were downstairs, and I remember Susan, being asked by Cherie 
what needlework she was going to take to the dining-room, 
saying : " Mon bas, ma chemise, et ma petite wobe, Chewie." 






THE NURSERY AND THE SCHOOLROOM 17 

On Saturday afternoons we often had a treat, and went to 
the German Reed's entertainment and Corney Grain, or to 
Maskelyne and Cook, and Hengler's Circus, and on Sundays 
we often went to the Zoo, or drove down to Coombe when 
Coombe existed. 

Lessons were in the hands of Cherie and Mrs. Christie. 
Cherie taught me to read and write in French, French history 
out of Lame Fleury, not without arguments on my part to 
learn it from the bigger grown-up book of Guizot, and French 
poetry. Every day began with a hideous ordeal called " La 
Page d'Ecriture." Cherie would write a phrase in enormous 
letters in a beautiful copy-book handwriting on the top line of 
the copy-book, and we had to copy the sentence on every other 
line, with a quill pen. Mrs. Christie, besides struggling with 
my arithmetic, used to teach us English literature, and make 
us learn passages from Shakespeare by heart, which were quite 
unintelligible to me, and passages from Byron, Walter Scott, 
Campbell, and Southey, and various pieces from the Children's 
Garland and Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. I enjoyed 
these whole-heartedly. 

Sometimes Mrs. Christie and CheYie used to have conversa- 
tions across the children, as it were, during lessons. I remember 
Mrs. Christie saying to Cherie while I was doing my lessons by 
Cherie 's side one day : " That child will give you more trouble 
than all the others." 

I liked history lessons, especially Lame Fleury's French 
history and mythology ; and in Lame Fleury's French history 
the favourite chapter was that beginning : " Jean 11. dit le bon 
commenca sonregne par un assassinat." The first book I read 
with Mrs. Christie was called Little Willie, and described the 
building of a house, an enchanting book. I did not like any 
of the English poetry we read, not understanding how by any 
stretch of the imagination it could be called poetry, as Shake- 
speare blank verse seemed to be a complicated form of prose 
full of uncouth words ; what we learnt being Clarence's 
dream, King Henry iv.'s battle speeches, which made me most 
uncomfortable for Cherie 's sake by their anti-French tone, and 
passages from Childe Harold, which I also found difficult to 
understand. The only poems I remember liking, which were 
revealed by Mrs. Christie, were Milton's L' Allegro and Pen- 
seroso, which I copied out in a book as soon as I could write. 



18 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

One day she read me out Gray's Elegy and I was greatly im- 
pressed. " That is," she said, " the most beautiful Elegy in the 
language." " Is it the most beautiful poem in the language ? " 
I asked, rather disappointed at the qualification, and hankering 
for an absolute judgment. "It's the most beautiful Elegy in 
the language," she said, and I had to be content with that. 

I don't want to give the impression that we, any of us, dis- 
liked Mrs. Christie's lessons in English literature. On the con- 
trary, we enjoyed them, and I am grateful for them till this day. 
She taught us nothing soppy nor second-rate. The piece of her 
repertoire I most enjoyed, almost best, was a fable by Gay called 
" The Fox at the Point of Death." She was always willing 
to explain things, and took for granted that when we didn't 
ask we knew. This was not always the case. One of the pieces 
I learnt by heart was Shelley's " Arethusa," the sound of which 
fascinated me. But I had not the remotest idea that it was 
about a river. The poem begins, as it will be remembered : 

" Arethusa arose 
From her couch of snows 
In the Acroceraunian mountains." 

For years I thought " Acroceraunian " was a kind of pin- 
cushion. 

Mrs. Christie had a passion for Sir Walter Scott and for the 
Waverley Novels. " You can't help," she said, " liking any 
King of England that Sir Walter Scott has written about." 
She instilled into us a longing to read Sir Walter Scott by pro- 
mising that we should read them when we were older. One of 
the most interesting discussions to me was that between Cherie 
and Mrs. Christie as to what English books the girls should be 
allowed to read in the country. Mrs. Christie told, to illus- 
trate a point, the following story. A French lady had once 
come across a French translation of an English novel, and seeing 
it was an English novel had at once given it to her daughter to 
read, as she said, of course, any English novel was fit for the 
jeune personne. The novel was called Les Papillons de Nuit. 
" And what do you think that was ? " said Mrs. Christie. 
" Moths, by Ouida ! " 

The first poem that really moved me was not shown me by 
Mrs. Christie, but by Mantle, the maid who looked after the girls. 
It was Mrs. Hemans' : " Oh, call my Brother back to me, I cannot 



THE NURSERY AND THE SCHOOLROOM 19 

play alone." This poem made me sob. I still think it is a 
beautiful and profoundly moving poem. Besides English, Mrs. 
Christie used to teach us Latin. I had my first Latin lesson the 
day after my eighth birthday. This is how it began : " Sup- 
posing," said Mrs. Christie, " you knocked at the door and the 
person inside said, ' Who's there ? ' What would you say ? " 
I thought a little, and then half-unconsciously said, " I." 
" Then," said Mrs. Christie, " that shows you have a natural 
gift for grammar." She explained that I ought reasonably 
to have said " Me." Why I said " I," I cannot think. I had 
no notion what her question was aiming at, and I feel certain 
I should have said " Me " in real life. The good grammar was 
quite unintentional. 

As for arithmetic, it was an unmixed pain, and there was an 
arithmetic book called Ibbister which represented to me the final 
expression of what was loathsome. One day in a passion with 
Cherie I searched my mind for the most scathing insult I could 
think of, and then cried out, " Vieille Ibbister." 

I learnt to read very quickly, in French first. In the nursery 
Grace and Annie read me Grimm's Fairy Tales till they were 
hoarse, and as soon as I could read myself I devoured any book 
of fairy-tales within reach, and a great many other books ; but I 
was not precocious in reading, and found grown-up books im- 
possible to understand. One of my favourite books later was 
The Crofton Boys, which Mrs. Christie gave me on 6th November 
1883, as a " prize for successful card-playing." It is very 
difficult for me to understand now how a child could have 
enjoyed the intensely sermonising tone of this book, but I 
certainly did enjoy it. 

I remember another book called Romance, or Chivalry and 
Romance. In it there was a story of a damsel who was really 
a fairy, and a bad fairy at that, who went into a cathedral 
in the guise of a beautiful princess, and when the bell rang at 
the Elevation of the Host, changed into her true shape and 
vanished. I consulted Mrs. Christie as to what the Elevation 
of the Host meant, and she gave me a clear account of what 
Transubstantiation meant, and she told me about Henry viil., 
the Defender of the Faith, and the Reformation, and made no 
comment on the truth or untruth of the dogma. Transub- 
stantiation seemed to me the most natural thing in the world, 
as it always does to children, and I privately made up my mind 



20 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

that on that point the Reformers must have been mistaken. 
One day Cherie said for every devoir I did, and for every time I 
wasn't naughty, I should be given a counter, and if I got twenty 
counters in three days I should get a prize. I got the twenty 
counters and sallied off to Hatchard's to get the prize. I chose 
a book called The Prince of the Hundred Soups because of its 
cover. It was by Vernon Lee, an Italian puppet-show in 
narrative, about a Doge who had to eat a particular kind of 
soup every day for a hundred days. It is a delightful story, 
and I revelled in it. On the title-page it was said that the 
book was by the author of Belcaro. I resolved to get Belcaro 
some day ; Belcaro sounded a most promising name, rich in 
possible romance and adventure, and I saved up my money 
for the purpose. When, after weeks, I had amassed the 
necessary six shillings, I went back to Hatchard's and bought 
Belcaro. Alas, it was an aesthetic treatise of the stiffest and 
driest and most grown-up kind. Years afterwards I told 
Vernon Lee this story, and she promised to write me another 
story instead of Belcaro, like The Prince of the Hundred Soups. 
The first book I read to myself was Alice in Wonderland, which 
John gave to me. Another book I remember enjoying very 
much was The King of the Golden River, by Ruskin. 

I enjoyed my French lessons infinitely more than my English 
ones. French poetry seemed to be the real thing, quite 
different from the prosaic English blank verse, except La 
Fontaine's Fables, which, although sometimes amusing, seemed 
to be almost as prosy as Shakespeare. They had to be learnt 
by heart, nevertheless. They seemed to be in the same relation 
to other poems, Victor Hugo's " Napoleon II." and " Dans 
L* Alcove sombre," which I thought quite enchanting, as meat 
was to pudding at luncheon, and I was not allowed to indulge 
in poetry until I had done my fable, but not without much 
argument. I sometimes overbore Cherie's will, but she more 
often got her way by saying : " Tu as toujours voulu ecrire 
avec un stylo avant de savoir ecrire avec une plume." I learnt 
a great many French poems by heart, and made sometimes 
startling use of the vocabulary. One day at luncheon I said 
to Cherie before the assembled company : " Cherie, comme ton 
front est nubile ! " the word nubile having been applied by the 
poet, Casimir de la Vigne, to Joan of Arc. 

The first French poem which really fired my imagination 



THE NURSERY AND THE SCHOOLROOM 21 

was a passage from Les Enfants d'Edouard, a play by the same 
poet, in which one of the little princes tells a dream, which 
Margaret used to recite in bloodcurdling tones, and his brother, 
the Duke of York, answers lyrically something about the sunset 
on the Thames. 1 Those lines fired my imagination as nothing 
else did. We once acted a scene from this play, Margaret and 
I playing the two brothers, and Susan the tearful and widowed 
queen and mother, and Hugo as a beefeater, who had to bawl 
at the top of his voice : " Reine, retirez-vous ! " when the queen's 
sobs became excessive, and indeed in Susan's rendering there 
was nothing wanting in the way of sobs, as she was a facile 
weeper, and Margaret used to call her " Madame la Pluie." 

As far back as I remember we used to act plays in French. 
The first one performed in the back drawing-room in Charles 
Street was called Comme on fait son lit on se couche, and I played 
some part in it which I afterwards almost regretted, as whenever 
a visitor came to luncheon I was asked to say a particular 
phrase out of it, and generally refused. This was not either 
from obstinacy or naughtiness ; it was simply to spare my 
mother humiliation. I was sure grown-up people could not 
help thinking the performance inadequate and trifling. I was 
simply covered with prospective shame and wished to spare 
them the same feeling. One day, when a Frenchman, Monsieur 
de Jaucourt, came to luncheon, I refused to say the sentence 
in question, in spite of the most tempting bribes, simply for 
that reason. I was hot with shame at thinking what Monsieur 
de Jaucourt — he a Frenchman, too — would think of something 
so inadequate. And this shows how impossible it is for grown- 
up people to put themselves in children's shoes and to divine 
their motives. If only children knew, it didn't matter what 
they said ! 

Another dramatic performance was a scene from Victor 
Hugo's drama, Angelo, in which Margaret, dressed in a crimson 
velvet cloak bordered with gold braid, declaimed a speech of 
Angelo Podesta of Padua, about the Council of Ten at Venice, 
while Susan, dressed in pink satin and lace, sat silent and 
attentive, looking meek in the part of the Venetian courtesan. 

1 " Libre, je rends visite a la terre, aux etoiles ; 
Sur la Tamise en feu je suis ces blanches voiles." 

Les Enfants d'Edouard, Act III. Sc. 1. 
Casimir Delavigne. 



22 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

All this happened during early years in London. 

Mademoiselle Ida used to enliven lessons with news from 
the outside world, discussions of books and concerts, and especi- 
ally of other artists. One day when I was sitting at my slate 
with Mrs. Christie, she was discussing English spelling, and say- 
ing how difficult it was. Mrs. Christie rashly said that I could 
spell very well, upon which Mademoiselle Ida said to me, " You 
would spell ' which ' double u i c h, wouldn't you ? " And I, 
anxious to oblige, said, " Yes." This was a bitter humiliation. 

Besides music lessons we had drawing lessons, first from a 
Miss Van Sturmer. Later we had lessons from Mr. Nathaniel 
Green, a water-colourist, who taught us perspective. One year 
I drew the schoolroom clock, which Mr. Jump used to come to 
wind once a week, as a present for my mother on her birthday, 
the 18th of June. 

Sometimes I shared my mother's lesson in water-colours. 
Mr. Green used to say he liked my washes, as they were warm. 
He used to put his brush in his mouth, which I considered 
dangerous, and he sometimes used a colour called Antwerp 
blue, which I thought was a pity, as it was supposed to fade. 
I was passionately fond of drawing, and drew both indoors and 
out of doors on every possible opportunity, and constantly 
illustrated various episodes in our life, or books that were 
being read out at the time. I took an immense interest in my 
mother's painting, especially in the colours : Rubens madder, 
cyanine, aureoline, green oxide of chromium, transparent — all 
seemed to be magic names. The draughtsman of the family 
was Elizabeth. None of my brothers drew. Elizabeth used 
to paint a bust of Clytie in oils, and sometimes she went as far 
as life-size portraits. Besides this, she was an excellent cari- 
caturist, and used to illustrate the main episodes of our family 
life in a little sketch-book. 

Lessons, on the whole, used to pass off peacefully. I 
don't think we were ever naughty with Mrs. Christie, although 
Elizabeth and Margaret used often to rock with laughter at 
some private joke of their own during their lessons, but with 
Cherie we were often naughty. The usual punishment was to 
be prive de pudding. When the currant and raspberry tart 
came round at luncheon we used to refuse it, and my mother 
used to press it on us, not knowing that we had been prive. 
Sometimes, too, we had to write out three tenses of the verb 



THE NURSERY AND THE SCHOOLROOM 23 

aimer, and on one occasion I refused: to do it. It was a Saturday 
afternoon ; there was a treat impending, and I was told I would 
not be allowed to go unless I copied out the tenses, but I re- 
mained firm throughout luncheon. Finally, at the end of 
luncheon I capitulated in a flood of tears and accepted the loan 
of my mother's gold pencil-case and scribbled J'aime, tu aimes, 
il aime, etc., on a piece of writing-paper. 

In the drawing-room we were not often naughty, but we 
were sometimes, and tried the grown-ups at moments beyond 
endurance. My mother said that she had had to whip us all 
except Hugo. I was whipped three times. Before the opera- 
tion my mother always took off her rings. 

Upstairs, Margaret and Elizabeth used sometimes to fight, 
and Susan would join in the fray, inspired by the impulse of the 
moment. She was liable to these sudden impulses, and on one 
occasion — she was very small — when she was looking on at a 
review of volunteers, when the guns suddenly fired, she stood 
up in the carriage and boxed everyone's ears. 

Not long ago we found an old mark-book which belonged 
to this epoch of schoolroom life, and in it was the following 
entry in Cherie's handwriting : " Elizabeth et Marguerite se 
sont battues, Suzanne s'est jetee sur le pauvre petit Maurice." 
Whenever Margaret saw that I was on the verge of tears she 
used to say that I made a special face, which meant I was 
getting ready to cry, and she called this la premiere position ; 
when the corners of the mouth went down, and the first 
snuffle was heard, she called it la seconde position ; and when 
tears actually came, it was la troisieme position. Nearly always 
the mention of la premiere position averted tears altogether. 

On Monday evenings in London my mother used to go 
regularly to the Monday Pops at St. James's Hall, and on Satur- 
day afternoon also. Dinner was at seven on Mondays, and 
we used to go down to it, and watch my mother cut up a leg 
of chicken and fill it with mustard and pepper and cayenne 
pepper to make a devil for supper. Margaret was sometimes 
taken to the Monday Pop, as she was supposed to like it, but 
the others were seldom taken, in case, my mother used to say, 
" You say when you are grown up that you were dragged to 
concerts, and get to dislike them." The result was a feverish 
longing to go to the Monday Pop. I don't remember going to 
the Monday Pop until I was grown up, but I know that I 



24 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

always wanted to go. I was taken to the Saturday Pop some- 
times, and the first one I went to was on 8th November 1879. 
I was five years old. This was the programme : 

Quartet, E Flat Mendelssohn 

Mme Norman Neruda, Ries, Zerbini, Piatti. 

Song . . . " O Swallow, Swallow" . . Piatti 

Mr. Santley. 
Violoncello obbligato, Signor Piatti. 

Sonata, C Sharp Minor . "Moonlight" . . . Beethoven 

Mlle Janotha. 

Sonata in F Major for Pianoforte and Violin, No. 9 Mozart 
Mlle Janotha and Mme Norman Neruda. 

Song . " The Erl King " . . . Schubert 

Mr. Santley. 

Trio in C Major ....... Haydn 

Mlle Janotha, Mme Norman Neruda, Signor Piatti. 

Every winter we were taken to the pantomime by Lord 
Antrim, and the pantomimes I remember seeing were Mother 
Goose, Robinson Crusoe, Siribad the Sailor, Aladdin, and 
Cinderella, in which the funny parts were played by Herbert 
Campbell and Harry Nichols, and the Princess sometimes by the 
incomparably graceful dancer, Kate Vaughan. 

I also remember the first Gilbert and Sullivan operas. 
Pinafore I was too young for ; but I saw the Children's Pina- 
fore, which was played by children. Patience and Iolanthe and 
Princess Ida I saw when they were first produced at the Savoy. 

Irving and Ellen Terry we never saw till I went to school, 
as Irving's acting in Shakespeare made my father angry. When 
he saw him play Romeo, he was heard to mutter the whole time : 
" Remove that man from the stage." 

Then there were children's parties. Strangely enough, I 
only remember one of these, so I don't expect I enjoyed them. 
But I remember a children's garden party at Marlborough 
House, and the exquisite beauty, the grace, and the fairy- 
tale-like welcome of the Princess of Wales. 

Two of the great days for the children in London were 
Valentine's Day, on the eve of which we each of us sent the 
whole of the rest of the family Valentines, cushioned and 
scented Valentines with silken fringes ; and the 1st of April, 



THE NURSERY AND THE SCHOOLROOM 25 

when Susan was always made an April fool, the best one being 
one of Cherie's, who sent her to look in the schoolroom for 
Les Memoires de Jonas dans la baleine. She searched con- 
scientiously, but in vain, for this interesting book. 

On one occasion, on the Prince of Wales' wedding-day, in 
March, the whole family were invited to a children's ball at 
Marlborough House. The girls' frocks were a subject of daily 
discussion for weeks beforehand, and other governesses used to 
come and discuss the matter. They were white frocks, and 
when they were ready they were found to be a failure, for some 
reason, and they had to be made all over again at another 
dressmaker's, called Mrs. Mason. It was on this occasion that 
Cherie made a memorable utterance and said : " Les pointes de 
Madame Mason sont incomparables," but not even Elizabeth 
had yet risen to the dignity of a pointe (the end of the pointed 
" bodies " of the fashions of that day). It was doubtful whether 
the new frocks would be ready in time. There was a momentous 
discussion as to whether they were to wear black stockings or 
not. Finally the frocks arrived, and we were dressed and were 
all marshalled downstairs ready to start. My father in knee- 
breeches and myself in a black velvet suit, black velvet breeches, 
and a white waistcoat. I was told to be careful to remember 
to kiss the Princess of Wales' hand. 

I can just remember the ballroom, but none of the grown-up 
people — nothing, in fact, except a vague crowd of tulle skirts. 

One night there was a ball, or rather a small dance, in Charles 
Street, and I was allowed to come down after going to bed all 
day. People shook their heads over this, and said I was being 
spoilt, to Cherie, but CheYie said : " Cet enfant n'est pas gate\ 
mais il se fait gater." 

The dance led off with a quadrille, in which I and my father 
both took part. After having carefully learnt the pas chasse 
at dancing lessons, I was rather shocked to find this elegant 
glide was not observed by the quadrille dancers. 

All this was the delightful epoch of the 'eighties, when the 
shop windows were full of photographs of the professional 
beauties, and bands played tunes from the new Gilbert and 
Sullivan in the early morning in the streets, and people rode 
in Rotten Row in the evening, and Chene used to rush us 
across the road to get a glimpse of Mrs. Langtry or the 
Princess of Wales. 



26 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Dancing lessons played an important part in our lives. Our 
first dancing instructor was the famous ex-ballerina, Madame 
Taglioni, a graceful old lady with grey curls, who held a class at 
Lady Granville's house in Carlton House Terrace. It was there 
I had my first dancing lesson and learnt the Tarantelle, a dance 
with a tambourine, which I have always found effective, if not 
useful, in later life. Then Madame Taglioni's class came to an 
end, and there was a class at Lady Ashburton's at Bath House, 
which was suddenly put a stop to owing to the rough and wild 
behaviour of the boys, myself among them. Finally we had a 
class in our own house, supervised by a strict lady in black silk, 
who taught us the pas chasse, the five positions, the valse, the 
polka, and the Lancers. 

Another event was Mrs. Christie's lottery, which was held 
once a year at her house at Kentish Town. All her pupils 
came, and everyone won a prize in the lottery. One year I won 
a stuffed duck. After tea we acted charades. On the way back 
we used to pass several railway bridges, and Cherie, producing a 
gold pencil, used to say : " Par la vertu de ma petite baguette," 
she would make a train pass. It was perhaps a rash boast, but 
it was always successful. 

We used to drive to Mrs. Christie's in a coach, an enormous 
carriage driven by Maisy, the coachman, who wore a white wig. 
It was only used when the whole family had to be transported 
somewhere. , 

Another incident of London life was Mademoiselle Ida's 
pupils' concert, which happened in the summer. I performed 
twice at it, I think, but never a solo. A duet with Mademoiselle 
Ida playing the bass, and whispering : " Gare au diese, gare au 
bemole," in my ear. What we enjoyed most about this was 
waiting in what was called the artists' room, and drinking 
raspberry vinegar. 

But the crowning bliss of London life was Hamilton Gardens, 
where we used to meet other children and play flags in the 
summer evenings. 

This was the scene of wild enjoyment, not untinged with 
romance, for there the future beauties of England were all at 
play in their lovely teens. We were given tickets for con- 
certs at the Albert Hall and elsewhere in the afternoon, but I 
remember that often when Hugo and I were given the choice 
of going to a concert or playing in the nursery, we sometimes 



THE NURSERY AND THE SCHOOLROOM 27 

chose to play. But I do remember hearing Patti sing " Coming 
thro' the Rye " at the Guildhall, and Albani and Santley on 
several occasions. 

But what we enjoyed most of all was finding some broken 
and derelict toy, and inventing a special game for it. Once in a 
cupboard in the back drawing-room I came across some old 
toys which had belonged to John and Cecil, and must have been 
there for years. Among other things there was an engine in 
perfectly good repair, with a little cone like the end of a cigar 
which you put inside the engine under the funnel. You then 
lit it and smoke came out, and the engine moved automatically. 
This seemed too miraculous for inquiry, and I still wonder how 
and why it happened. Then the toy was unaccountably lost, 
and I never discovered the secret of this mysterious and wonder- 
ful engine. 

During all this time there were two worlds of which one 
gradually became conscious : the inside world and the outside 
world. The centre of the inside world, like the sun to the solar 
system, was, of course, our father and mother (Papa and 
Mamma), the dispenser of everything, the source of all enjoy- 
ment, and the final court of appeal, recourse to which was often 
threatened in disputes. 

Next came Cherie, then my mother's maid, Dimmock, then 
Sheppy, the housekeeper, who had white grapes, cake, and other 
treats in the housekeeper's room. She was a fervent Salva- 
tionist and wore a Salvationist bonnet, and when my father 
got violent and shouted out loud ejaculations, she used to coo 
softly in a deprecating tone. 

Then there was Monsieur Butat,the cook, who used to appear 
in white after breakfast when my father ordered dinner ; Deacon, 
his servant, was the source of all worldly wisdom and experi- 
ence, and recommended brown billycock hats in preference to 
black ones, because they did not fade in the sea air ; Harriet, 
the housemaid, who used to bring a cup of tea in the early 
morning to my mother's bedroom, and Frank the footman. 
I can't remember a butler in London, but I suppose there was 
one ; but if it was the same one we had in the country, it was 
Mr. Watson. 

Dimmock, or D., as we used to call her, played a great part 
in my early life, because when I came up to London or went 
down to the country alone with my father and mother she used 



28 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

to have sole charge of me, and I slept in her room. One day, 
during one of these autumnal visits to London, I was given an 
umbrella with a skeleton's head on it. This came back in 
dreams to me with terrific effect, and for several nights running 
I ran down from the top to the bottom of the house in terror. 
The umbrella was taken away. I used to love these visits to 
London when half the house was shut up, and there was no 
one there except my father and mother and D., and we used to 
live in the library downstairs. There used to be long and almost 
daily expeditions to shops because Christmas was coming, as 
D. used to chant to me every morning, and the Christmas-tree 
shopping had to be done. D. and I used to buy all the materials 
for the Christmas-tree — the candles, the glass balls, and the fairy 
to stand at the top of it — in a shop in the Edgware Road called 
Eagle. I used to have dinner in the housekeeper's room with 
Sheppy, and spent most of my time in D.'s working-room. One 
day she gave me a large piece of red plush, and I had something 
sewn round it, and called it Red Conscience. Never did a present 
make me more happy ; I treated it as something half sacred, like 
a Mussulman's mat. 

On one occasion D. and I went to a matinee at St. James's 
Theatre to see A Scrap of Paper, played by Mr. and Mrs. KendaL 
This year I read the play it was translated from (Sardou's Pattes 
de Mouche) for the first time, and I found I could recollect every 
scene of the play, and Mrs. Kendal's expression and intonation. 

Another time Madame Neruda, who was a great friend of my 
mother's, whom we saw constantly, gave me two tickets for a 
ballad concert at which she was playing. The policeman was 
told to take me into the artists' room during the interval. 
D. was to take me, but for some reason she thought the concert 
was in the evening, and it turned out to be in the afternoon ; 
so as a compensation my father sent us to an operetta called 
Falka, in which Miss Violet Cameron sang. I enjoyed it more 
than any concert. The next day Madame Neruda came to 
luncheon and heard all about the misadventure. "And did 
you enjoy your operetta ? " she asked. " Yes," I said, with 
enthusiasm. " Say, not as much as you would have enjoyed 
the ballad concert," said my mother. But I didn't feel so sure 
about that. 

I used to do lessons with Mrs. Christie, and have music 
lessons from Mademoiselle Ida, and in the afternoon I often 



THE NURSERY AND THE SCHOOLROOM 29 

used to go out shopping in the carriage with my mother, or 
for a walk with D. But I will tell more about her later when 
I describe Membland. 

The girls had a maid who looked after them called Rawlin- 
son, and she and the nursery made up the rest of the inside 
world in London. 

In the outside world the first person of importance I re- 
member was Grandmamma, my mother's mother, Lady Eliza- 
beth Bulteel, who used to paint exquisite pictures for the 
children like the pictures on china, and play songs for us on the 
pianoforte. She often came to luncheon, and used to bring toys 
to be raffled for, and make us, at the end of luncheon, sing a song 

which ran : 

" A pie sat on a pear tree, 
And once so merrily hopped she, 
And twice so merrily hopped she, 
Three times so merrily hopped she," 

Each singer held a glass in his hand. When the song had 

got thus far, everyone drained their glass, and the person 

who finished first had to say the last line of the verse, which 

was : 

" Ya-he, ya-ho, ya-ho." 

And the person who said it first, won. 

Everything about Grandmamma was soft and exquisite : 
her touch on the piano and her delicate manipulation of 
the painting-brush. She lived in Green Street, a house I re- 
member as the perfection of comfort and cultivated dignity. 
There were amusing drawing-tables with tiles, pencils, painting- 
brushes ; chintz chairs and books and music ; a smell of pot- 
pourri and lavender water ; miniatures in glass tables, pretty 
china, and finished water-colours. 

In November 1880 — this is one of the few dates I can place — 
we were in London, my father and mother and myself, and 
Grandmamma was not well. She must have been over eighty, I 
think. Every day I used to go to Green Street with my mother 
and spend the whole morning illuminating a text. I was 
told Grandmamma was very ill, and had to take the nastiest 
medicines, and was being so good about it. I was sometimes 
taken in to see her. One day I finished the text, and it was 
given to Grandmamma. That evening when I was having my 
tea, my father and mother came into the dining-room and told 



30 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

me Grandmamma was dead. The text I had finished was 
buried with her. 

The next day at luncheon I asked my mother to sing " A 
pie sat on a pear tree," as usual. It was the daily ritual of 
luncheon. She said she couldn't do " Hopped she," as we called 
it, any longer now that Grandmamma was not there. 

Another thing Grandmamma had always done at luncheon 
was to break a thin water biscuit into two halves, so that one 
half looked like a crescent moon ; and I said to my mother, 
" We shan't be able to break biscuits like that any more." 



CHAPTER III 
MEMBLAND 

TO mention any of the other people of the outside world 
at once brings me to Membland, because the outside 
world was intimately connected with that place. 
Membland was a large, square, Jacobean house, white brick, 
green shutters and ivy, with some modern gabled rough-cast 
additions and a tower, about twelve miles from Plymouth and 
ten miles from the station Ivy Bridge. 

On the north side of the house there was a gravel yard, on 
the south side a long, sweeping, sloping lawn, then a ha-ha, a 
field beyond this and rookery which was called the Grove. 

When you went through the front hall you came into a large 
billiard-room in which there was a staircase leading to a gallery 
going round the room and to the bedrooms. The billiard-room 
was high and there were no rooms over the billiard-room proper 
— but beyond the billiard-table the room extended into a lower 
section, culminating in a semicircle of windows in which there 
was a large double writing-table. 

Later, under the staircase, there was an organ, and the pipes 
of the great organ were on the wall. 

There was a drawing-room full of chintz chairs, books, pot- 
pourri, a grand pianoforte, and two writing-tables ; a dining- 
room looking south ; a floor of guests' rooms ; a bachelors' 
passage in the wing ; a schoolroom on the ground floor looking 
north, with a little dark room full of rubbish next to it, which 
was called the Cabinet Noir, and where we were sent when we 
were naughty ; and a nursery floor over the guests' rooms. 

From the northern side of the house you could see the hills 
of Dartmoor. In the west there was a mass of tall trees, Scotch 
firs, stone-pines, and ashes. 

There was a large kitchen garden at some distance from 
the house on a hill and enclosed by walls. 



32 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Our routine of life was much the same as it was in London, 
except that the children had breakfast in the schoolroom at 
nine, as the grown-ups did not have breakfast till later. 

Then came lessons, a walk, or play in the garden, further 
lessons, luncheon at two, a walk or an expedition, lessons from 
five till six, and then tea and games or reading aloud afterwards. 
One of the chief items of lessons was the Dictee, in which we all 
took part, and even Everard from Eton used to come and join 
in this sometimes. 

Elizabeth won a kind of inglorious glory one day by making 
thirteen mistakes in her dictee, which was the record — a record 
never beaten by any one of us before or since ; and the words 
treize f antes used often to be hurled at her head in moments of 
stress. 

After tea Cherie used to read out books to the girls, and I 
was allowed to listen, although I was supposed to be too young 
to understand, and indeed I was. Nevertheless, I found the 
experience thrilling ; and there are many book incidents which 
have remained for ever in my mind, absorbed during these 
readings, although I cannot always place them. I recollect a 
wonderful book called U Homme de Neige, and many passages 
from Alexandre Dumas. 

Sometimes Cherie would read out to me, especially stories 
from the Cabinet des Fees, or better still, tell stories of her own 
invention. There was one story in which many animals took 
part, and one of the characters was a partridge who used to go 
out just before the shooting season with a telescope under his 
wing to see whether things were safe. Cherie always used to 
say this was the creation she was proudest of. Another story 
was called Le Prince Muguet et Princesse Myosotis, which my 
mother had printed. I wrote a different story on the same 
theme and inspired by Cherie's story when I grew up. But I 
enjoyed Cherie's recollections of her childhood as much as her 
stories, and I could listen for ever to the tales of her grand-mlre 
severe who made her pick thorny juniper to make gin, or the story 
of a lady who had only one gown, a yellow one, and who every 
day used to ask her maid what the weather was like, and if the 
maid said it was fine, she would say, " Eh bien, je mettrai ma 
robe jaune," and if it was rainy she would likewise say, " Je 
mettrai ma robe jaune." Poor Cherie used to be made to repeat 
this story and others like it in season and out of season. 



MEMBLAND 33 

She would describe Paris until I felt I knew every street, 
and landscapes in Normandy and other parts of France. The 
dream of my life was to go to Paris and see the Boulevards 
and the Invalides and the Arc de Triomphe, and above all, the 
Champs Elysees. 

Cherie had also a repertory of French songs which she used 
to teach us. One was the melancholy story of a little cabin-boy : 

" Je ne suis qu'un petit mousse 

A bord d'un vaisseau royal, 
Je vais partout ou le vent me pousse, 

Nord ou midi cela m'est egale. 
Car d'une mere et d'un pere 

Je n'ai jamais connu l'amour." 

Another one, less pathetic but more sentimental, was : 

" Pourquoi tous les jours, Madeleine, 

Vas-tu au bord du ruisseau ? 
Ce n'est pas, car je 1'espere, 

Pour te regarder dans l'eau, 
' Mais si,' repond Madeleine, 

Baissant ses beaux yeux d'ebene. 
Je n'y vais pour autre raison." 

I forget the rest, but it said that she looked into the stream 
to see whether it was true, as people said, that she was beautiful 
— " pour voir si gent ne ment pas " — and came back satisfied 
that it was true. 

But best of all I liked the ballad : 

" En revenant des noces j'etais si fatiguee 

Au bord d'un ruisseau je me suis reposee, 
L'eau etait si claire que je me suis baignee, 

Avec une feuille de chene je me suis essuyee, 
Sur la plus haute branche un rossignol chantait, 

Chante, beau rossignol, si tu as le cceur gai, 
Pour un bouton de rose mon ami s'est fache, 
Je voudrais que la rose fut encore au rosier," 

or words to that effect. 

Besides these she taught us all the French singing games : 
" Savez-vous planter les choux ? " " Sur le pont d'Avignon," 
and " Qu'est qui passe ici si tard, Compagnons de la Mar- 
jolaine ? " We used to sing and dance these up and down the 
passage outside the schoolroom after tea. 

Round about Membland were several nests of relations. Six 
miles off was my mother's old home Flete, where the Mildmays 
lived. Uncle Bingham Mildmay married my mother's sister, 
3 



34 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Aunt Georgie, and bought Flete ; the house, which was old, was 
said to be falling to pieces, so it was rebuilt, more or less on the 
old lines, with some of the old structure left intact. 

At Pamnete, three miles off, lived my mother's brother, 
Uncle Johnny Bulteel, with his wife, Aunt Effie, and thirteen 
children. 

And in the village of Yealmpton, three miles off, also lived 
my great -aunt Jane who had a sister called Aunt Sister, who, 
whenever she heard carriage wheels in the drive, used to get 
under the bed, such was her disinclination to receive guests. I 
cannot remember Aunt Sister, but I remember Aunt Jane and 
Uncle Willie Harris, who was either her brother or her husband. 
He had been present at the battle of Waterloo as a drummer- 
boy at the age of fifteen. But Aunt Sister's characteristics had 
descended to other members of the family, and my mother used 
to say that when she and her sister were girls my Aunt Georgie 
had offered her a pound if she would receive some guests instead 
of herself. 

On Sundays we used to go to church at a little church in 
Noss Mayo until my father built a new church, which is there 
now. 

The service was long, beginning at eleven and lasting till 
almost one. There was morning prayer, the Litany, the Anti- 
Communion service, and a long sermon preached by the rector, 
a charming old man called Mr. Roe, who was not, I fear, a 
compelling preacher. 

When we went to church I was given a picture-book when 
I was small to read during the sermon, a book with sacred 
pictures in colours. I was terribly ashamed of this. I would 
sooner have died than be seen in the pew with this book. It was 
a large picture-book. So I used every Sunday to lose or hide it 
just before the service, and find it again afterwards. On Sunday 
evenings we used sometimes to sing hymns in the schoolroom. 
The words of the hymns were a great puzzle. For instance, in 
the hymn, " Thy will be done," the following verse occurs — I 
punctuate it as I understood it, reading it, that is to say, 
according to the tune — 

" Renew my will fronTxIay to day, 
Blend it with Thine, and take away. 
All that now makes it hard to say 
Thy will be done." 



MEMBLAND 35 

I thought the blending and the subsequent taking away of 
what was blent was a kind of trial of faith. 

After tea, instead of being read to, we used sometimes to 
play a delightful round game with counters, called Le Nain 
Jaune. 

Any number of people could play at it, and I especially 
remember Susan triumphantly playing the winning card and 
saying : 

" Le bon Woi, la bonne Dame, le bon Valet. Je wecom- 
mence." 

In September or October, Cherie would go for her holidays. 
I cannot remember if she went every year, but we had no one 
instead of her, and she left behind her a series of holiday tasks. 

During one of her absences my Aunt M'aimee, another 
sister of my mother's, came to stay with us. Aunt M'aimee 
was married to Uncle Henry Ponsonby, the Queen's Private 
Secretary. He came, too, and with them their daughter Betty. 
Betty had a craze at that time for Sarah Bernhardt, and gave a 
fine imitation of her as Dona Sol in the last act of Hernani. 
It was decided we should act this whole scene, with Margaret 
as Hernani and Aunt M'aimee reading the part of Ruy Gomez, 
who appears in a domino and mask. 

Never had I experienced anything more thrilling. I used to 
lie on the floor during the rehearsals, and soon I knew the whole 
act by heart. 

When Cherie came back she was rather surprised and not 
altogether pleased to find I knew the whole of the last act of 
Hernani by heart. She thought this a little too exciting and 
grown-up for me, and even for Margaret, but none the less 
she let me perform the part of Dona Sol one evening after tea in 
my mother's bedroom, dressed in a white frock, with Susan in a 
riding-habit playing the sinister figure of Ruy Gomez. I can 
see Cherie now, sitting behind a screen, book in hand to prompt 
me, and shaking with laughter as I piped out in a tremulous and 
lisping treble the passionate words : 

" II vaudrait mieuxzaller (which I made all one word) au tigre meme 
Arracher ses petits qu'a moi celui que j'aime." 

Cherie's return from her holidays was one of the most 
exciting of events, for she would bring back with her a mass of 
toys from Giroux and the Paradis des Enfants, and a flood of 



36 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

stories about the people and places and plays she had seen, and 
the food she had eaten. 

One year she brought me back a theatre of puppets. It 
was called Theatre francais. It had a white proscenium, three 
scenes and an interior, a Moorish garden by moonlight, and a 
forest, and a quantity of small puppets suspended by stiff wires 
and dressed in silk and satin. There was a harlequin, a colum- 
bine, a king, a queen, many princesses, a villain scowling beneath 
black eyebrows, an executioner with a mask, peasants, pastry- 
cooks, and soldiers with halberds, who would have done honour 
to the Papal Guard at the Vatican, and some heavily moustached 
gendarmes. This theatre was a source of ecstasy, and innumer- 
able dramas used to b'e performed in it. Cherie used also to 
bring back some delicious cakes called nonnettes, a kind of ginger- 
bread with icing on the top, rolled up in a long paper cylinder. 

She also brought baskets of bonbons from Boissier, the kind 
of basket which had several floors of different kinds of bonbons, 
fondants on the top in their white frills, then caramels, then 
chocolates, then fruits confits. All these things confirmed one's 
idea that there could be no place like Paris. 

In 1878, when I was four years old, another brother was born, 
Rupert, in August, but he died in October of the same year. 
He was buried in Revelstoke Church, a church not used any 
more, and then in ruins except for one aisle, which was roofed 
in, and provided with pews. It nestled by the seashore, right 
down on the rocks, grey and covered with ivy, and surrounded 
by quaint tombstones that seemed to have been scattered 
haphazard in the thick grass and the nettles. 

I think it was about the same time that one evening I was 
playing in my godmother's room, that I fell into the fire, and 
my little white frock was ablaze and my back badly burnt. 
I remember being taken up to the nursery and having my 
back rubbed with potatoes, and thinking that part, and the 
excitement and sympathy shown, and the interest created, 
great fun. 

All this was before Hugo was in the schoolroom, but in all my 
sharper memories of Membland days he plays a prominent 
part. We, of course, shared the night nursery, and we soon 
invented games together, some of which were distracting, not 
to say maddening, to grown-up people. One was an imaginary 
language in which even the word " Yes " was a trisyllable, 



MEMBLAND 



37 



namely : " Sheepartee," and the word for " No " was even longer 
and more complicated, namely : " Quiliquinino." We used to 
talk this language, which was called " Sheepartee," and which 
consisted of unmitigated gibberish, for hours in the nursery, 
till Hilly, Grace, and Annie could bear it no longer, and Everard 
came up one evening and told us the language must stop or we 
should be whipped. 

The language stopped, but a game grew out of it, which was 
most complicated, and lasted for years even after we went to 
school. The game was called " Spankaboo." It consisted of 
telling and acting the story of an imaginary continent in which 
we knew the countries, the towns, the government, and the 
leading people. These countries were generally at war with one 
another. Lady Spankaboo was a prominent lady at the Court 
of Doodahn. She was a charming character, not beautiful nor 
clever, and sometimes a little bit foolish, but most good-natured 
and easily taken in. Her husband, Lord Spankaboo, was a 
country gentleman, and they had no children. She wore red 
velvet in the evening, and she was Men vue at Court. 

There were hundreds of characters in the game. They in- 
creased as the story grew. It could be played out of doors, 
where all the larger trees in the garden were forts belonging to the 
various countries, or indoors, but it was chiefly played in the 
garden, or after we went to bed. Then Hugo would say : " Let's 
play Spankaboo," and I would go straight on with the latest 
events, interrupting the narrative every now and then by saying : 
" Now, you be Lady Spankaboo," or whoever the character on 
the stage might be for the moment, " and I'll be So-and-so." 
Everything that happened to us and everything we read was 
brought into the game — history, geography, the ancient Romans, 
the Greeks, the French ; but it was a realistic game, and there 
were no fairies in it and nothing in the least frightening. As 
it was a night game, this was just as well. 

Hugo was big for his age, with powerful lungs, and after 
luncheon he used to sing a song called " Apples no more," with 
immense effect. Hugo was once told the following riddle : 
" Why can't an engine-driver sit down ? " — to which the answer 
is, " Because he has a tender behind." He asked this to my 
mother at luncheon the next day, and when nobody could guess 
it, he said : " Because he has a soft behind." There was a 
groom in the stables who had rather a Japanese cast of face, 



38 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

and we used to call him le Japonnais. One day Hugo went 
and stood in front of him and said to him : " You're the 
Japonais." 

We were constantly in D.'s room and used to play sad tricks 
on her. She rashly told us one day that her brother Jim had 
once taken her to a fair at Wallington and had there shown her 
a Punch's face, in gutta-percha, on the wall. " Go and touch 
his nose," had said Jim. She did so, and the face being charged 
with electricity gave her a shock. 

This story fired our imagination and we resolved to follow 
Jim's example. We got a galvanic battery, how and where, I 
forget, the kind which consists of a small box with a large 
magnet in it, and a handle which you turn, the patient holding 
two small cylinders. We persuaded D. to hold the cylinders, 
and then we made the current as strong as possible and turned 
the handle with all our might. Poor D. screamed and tears 
poured down her cheeks, but we did not stop, and she could 
not leave go because the current contracts the fingers ; we went 
on and on till she was rescued by someone else. 

Another person we used to play tricks on was Mr. Butat, the 
cook, and one day Hugo and I, to his great indignation, threw a 
dirty mop into his stock-pot. 

A great ally in the house was the housekeeper, Mrs. Tudgay. 
Every day at eleven she would have two little baskets ready for 
us, which contained biscuits, raisins and almonds, two little 
cakes, and perhaps a tangerine orange. , 

To the outside world Mrs. Tudgay was rather alarming. 
She had a calm, crystal, cold manner ; she was thin, reserved, 
rather sallow, and had a clear, quiet, precise way of saying 
scathing and deadly things to those whom she disliked. Once 
when Elizabeth was grown up and married and happened to be 
staying with us, Mrs. Tudgay said to her : " You're an expense 
to his Lordship." Once when she engaged an under-housemaid 
she said : " She shall be called — nothing — and get £15 a year." 
But for children she had no terrors. She was devoted to us, 
bore anything, did anything, and guarded our effects and 
belongings with the vigilance of a sleepless hound. She had 
formerly been maid to the Duchess of San Marino in Italy, 
and she had a fund of stories about Italy, a scrap-book full 
of Italian pictures and photographs, and a silver cross con- 
taining a relic of the True Cross given her by Pope Pius ix. 



MEMBLAND 39 

We very often spent the evening in the housekeeper's room, 
and played Long Whist with Mrs. Tudgay, D., Mr. Deacon, and 
John's servant, Mr. Thompson. 

When, in the morning, we were exhausted from playing 
forts and Spankaboo in the garden, we used to. leap through 
Mrs. Tudgay 's window into the housekeeper's room, which was 
on the ground floor and looked out on to the garden, and demand 
refreshment, and Mrs. Tudgay used to bring two wine glasses of 
ginger wine and some biscuits. 

Sometimes we used to go for picnics with Mrs. Tudgay, D., 
Hilly, and the other servants. We started out in the morning 
and took luncheon with us, which was eaten at one of the many 
keepers' houses on the coast, some of which had a room kept for 
expeditions, and then spend the afternoon paddling on the 
rocks and picking shells and anemones. We never bathed, as 
there was not a single beach on my father's estate where it was 
possible. It was far too rocky. Mrs. Tudgay had a small and 
ineffectual Pomeranian black dog called Albo, who used to be 
taken on these expeditions. Looking back on these, I wonder 
at the quantity of food D. and Mrs. Tudgay used to allow us to 
eat. Hugo and I thought nothing of eating a whole lobster 
apiece, besides cold beef and apple tart. 

Sometimes we all went expeditions with my mother. Then 
there used to be sketching, and certainly more moderation in 
the way of food. 

Membland was close to the sea. My father made a ten- 
mile drive along the cliffs so that you could drive from the 
house one way, make a complete circle, and come back following 
the seacoast all the way to the river Yealm, on one side of 
which was the village of Newton Ferrers and on the other the 
village of Noss Mayo. Both villages straggled down the slopes 
of a steep hill. Noss Mayo had many white-washed and straw- 
thatched cottages and some new cottages of Devonshire stone 
built by my father, with slate roofs, but not ugly or aggressive. 
Down the slopes of Noss there were fields and orchards, and here 
and there a straw-thatched cottage. They were both fishing 
villages, the Yealm lying beneath them, a muddy stretch at 
low tide and a brimming river at high tide. Newton had an old 
grey Devonshire church with a tower at the west end. At Noss 
my father built a church exactly the same in pattern of Devon- 
shire stone. You could not have wished for a prettier village 



40 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

than Noss, and it had, as my mother used to say : " a little 
foreign look about it." 

At different points of this long road round the cliffs, which 
in the summer were a blaze of yellow gorse, there were various 
keepers' cottages, as I have said. From one you looked straight 
on to the sea from the top of the cliff. Another was hidden low 
down among orchards and not far from the old ruined church 
of Revelstoke. A third, called Battery Cottage, was built near 
the emplacement of an old battery and looked out on to the 
Mewstone towards Plymouth Sound and Ram Head. The 
making of this road and the building of the church were two 
great events. Pieces of the cliff had to be blasted with dynamite, 
which was under the direction of a cheery workman called Mr. 
Yapsley, during the road-making, and the building of the 
church which was in the hands of Mr. Crosbie, the Clerk of the 
Works, whom we were devoted to, entailed a host of interesting 
side-issues. One of these was the carving which was done by 
Mr. Harry Hems of Exeter. He carved the bench-ends, and on 
one of them was a sea battle in which a member of the Bulteel 
family, whom we took to be Uncle Johnny, was seen hurling a 
stone from a mast's crows' nest in a sailing ship, on to a serpent 
which writhed in the waves. Hugo and I both sat for cherubs' 
heads, which were carved in stone on the reredos. There were 
some stained-glass windows and a hand-blown organ on which 
John used to play on Sundays when it was ready. 

The church was consecrated by the Bishop of Exeter, 
Bishop Temple. 

Hugo and I learned to ride first on a docile beast called 
Emma, who, when she became too lethargic, was relegated to a 
little cart which used to be driven by all of us, and then on a 
Dartmoor pony called the Giant, and finally on a pony called 
Emma Jane. 

The coachman's name was Bilky. He was a perfect Devon- 
shire character. His admiration for my brothers was un- 
bounded. He used to talk of them one after the other, afraid 
if he had praised one, he had not praised the others enough. 
My brother Everard, whom we always called the " Imp," he said 
was as strong as a lion and as nimble as a bee. "They have 
rightly, sir, named you the Himp," one of the servants said to 
him one day. 

During all these years we had extraordinarily few illnesses. 



MEMBLAND 41 

Hugo once had whooping-cough at London, and I was put in the 
same room so as to have it at the same time, and although I was 
longing to catch it, as Hugo was rioting in presents and delicacies 
as well as whoops, my constitution was obstinately impervious 
to infection. 

We often had colds, entailing doses of spirits of nitre, linseed 
poultices, and sometimes even a mustard poultice, but I never 
remember anything more serious. Every now and then Hilly 
thought it necessary to dose us with castor-oil, and the struggles 
that took place when Hilly used to arrive with a large spoon, 
saying, as every Nanny I have ever known says : " Now, take 
it ! " were indescribable. I recollect five people being necessary 
one day to hold me down before the castor-oil could be got 
down my throat. We had a charming comfortable country 
doctor called Doctor Atkins, who used to drive over in a dog- 
cart, muffled in wraps, and produce a stethoscope out of his hat. 
He was so genial and comfortable that one began to feel better 
directly he felt one's pulse. 

When we first went to Membland the post used to be brought 
by a postman who walked every day on foot from Ivy Bridge, 
ten miles off. He had a watch the size of a turnip, and the 
stamps at that time were the dark red ones with the Queen's 
head on them. Later the post came in a cart from Plympton, 
and finally from Plymouth. 

In the autumn, visitors used to begin to arrive for the 
covert shooting, which was good and picturesque, the pheasants 
flying high in the steep woods on the banks of the Yealm, and 
during the autumn months the nearing approach of Christmas 
cast an aura of excitement over life. The first question was : 
Would there be a Christmas tree ? During all the early years 
there was one regularly. 

After the November interval in London, which I have 
already described, the serious business of getting the tree 
ready began. It was a large tree, and stood in a square 
green box. 

The first I remember was placed in the drawing-room, the 
next in the dining-room, the next in the billiard-room, and 
after that they were always in the covered-in tennis court, which 
had been built in the meanwhile. The decoration of the tree was 
under the management of D. The excitement when the tree 
was brought into the house or the tennis court for the first time 



42 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

was terrific, and Mr. Ellis, the house-carpenter, who always wore 
carpet shoes, climbed up a ladder and affixed the silver fairy to 
the top of the tree. Then reels of wire were brought out, scissors, 
boxes of crackers, boxes of coloured candles, glass-balls, clips for 
candles, and a quantity of little toys. 

Hugo and I were not allowed to do much. Nearly every- 
thing we did was said to be wrong. The presents were, of course, 
kept a secret and were done up in parcels, and not brought into 
the room until the afternoon of Christmas Eve. 

The Christmas tree was lit on Christmas Eve after tea. The 
ritual was always the same. Hugo and I ran backwards and 
forwards with the servants' presents. The maids were given 
theirs first, — they consisted of stuff for a gown done up in a parcel, 
— then Mrs. Tudgay, D., and the upper servants. One year Mrs. 
Tudgay had a work-basket. 

Then the guests were given their presents, and we gave our 
presents and received our own. The presents we gave were 
things we had made ourselves : kettle-holders, leather slippers 
worked in silk for my father, and the girls sometimes made a 
woollen waistcoat or a comforter. Cherie always had a nice 
present for my mother, which we were allowed to see beforehand, 
and she always used to say : " N'y touchez pas, la fraicheur en 
fait la beaute." 

Our presents were what we had put down beforehand in a 
list of " Christmas Wants " — a horse and cart, a painting-box, or 
a stylograph pen. 

The house used to be full at Christmas. My father's 
brothers, Uncle Tom and Uncle Bob, used to be there. Madame 
Neruda I remember as a Christmas visitor. Godfrey Webb 
wrote the following lines about Christmas at Membland : 

CHRISTMAS AT MEMBLAND 

" Who says that happiness is far to seek ? 
Here have I passed a happy Christmas week. 
Christmas at Membland — all was bright and gay, 
Without one shadow till this final day, 
When Mrs. Baring said, 'Before you go 
You must write something in the book, you know.' 
I must write something — that's all very well. 
But what to write about I cannot tell. 
Where shall I look for help ? — it must be found, 
If I survey this Christmas party round. 



MEMBLAND 43 

There's Ned himself, our most delightful host, 

Or Mrs. Baring, she could help me most, 

The Uncles too, if I their time might rob. 

Shall I ask Tom ? or try my luck with Bob ? 

Madame Neruda, ah, would she begin, 

We'd write the story of a violin, 

And tell how first the inspiration came 

Which took the world by storm and gave her fame. 

There's Harry Bourke, with him I can't go wrong, 

Could I but write the words he'd sing the song. 

So sung, my verse would haply win a smile 

From his bright beauty of the sister Isle, 

Who comes prepared her country's pride to save, 

For every Saxon is at once her slave ; 

But no, I must not for assistance look, 

So, Mrs. Baring, you must keep your book 

For cleverer pens and I no more will trouble you, 

But just remain your baffled bard." 

G. W. (1879). 

Mr. Webb was a great feature in the children's life of many 
families. With his beady, bird-like eye and his impassive face 
he made jokes so quietly that you overheard them rather than 
heard them. One day out shooting on a steep hill in Newton 
Wood, in which there were woodcock and dangerous shots, my 
father said to him, " You take the middle drive, Godfrey; it's 
safer, medio tutissimus." " Is there any chance of an Ibis ? " 
Mr. Webb asked quietly. 

Another Christmas event was the French play we used to 
act under the stage management of Cherie. 

When I was six I played the part of an old man with 
a bald forehead and white tufts of hair in a play called Le 
Maitre d'Ecole, and I remember playing the part of Nicole 
in scenes from the Bourgeois Gentilhomme at Christmas in 
1883, and an old witch called Mathurine in a play called 
Le Talisman in January 1884. 

One of our most ambitious efforts was a play called La Gram- 
maire, by Labiche : it proved too ambitious, and never got 
further than a dress rehearsal in the schoolroom. In this play, 
Elizabeth had the part of the heroine, and had to be elegantly 
dressed ; she borrowed a grown-up gown, and had her hair 
done up, but she took such a long time preening herself that she 
missed her cue, which was : " L'ange la voici ! " It was spoken 
by Margaret, who had a man's part. 



44 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

" L'ange la void ! " said Margaret in ringing tones, but no 
ange appeared. " L'ange la voici ! " repeated Margaret, with 
still greater emphasis, but still no ange; finally, not without 
malice, Margaret almost shouted, " L'ange la voici ! " and at 
last Elizabeth tripped blushing on to the stage with the final 
touches of her toilette still a little uncertain. In the same play, 
Susan played the part of a red-nosed horse-coper, dressed in a 
grey-tailed coat, called Machut. 

Another source of joy in Membland life was the yacht, the 
Waterwitch, which in the summer months used to sail as soon as 
the Cowes Regatta was over, down to the Yealm River. The, 
Waterwitch was a schooner of 150 tons ; it had one large cabin 
where one had one's meals, my mother's cabin aft, a cabin for 
my father, and three spare cabins. The name of the first captain 
was Goomes, but he was afterwards replaced by Bletchington. 
Goomes was employed later by the German Emperor. He had 
a knack of always getting into rows during races, and even on 
other occasions. 

One day there was a regatta going on on the Yealm River ; 
the gig of the Waterwitch was to race the gig of another yacht. 
They had to go round a buoy. For some reason, I was in the 
Waterwitch' s gig when the race started, sitting in the stern next 
to Goomes, who was steering. All went well at first, but when the 
boats were going round the buoy they fouled, and Goomes and 
the skipper of the rival gig were soon engaged in a hand-to-hand 
combat, and beating each other hard with the steering-lines. My 
father and the rest of the family were watching the race on 
board the yacht. I think I was about six or seven. My father 
shouted at the top of his voice, " Come back, come back," but 
to no avail, as Goomes and the other skipper were fighting like 
two dogs, and the boats were almost capsizing. I think Goomes 
won the fight and the race. I remember enjoying it all heartily, 
but not so my father on board the yacht. 

Bletchington was a much milder person and, besides being a 
beautiful sailor, one of the gentlest and most beautiful- mannered 
mariners I have ever met. He was invariably optimistic, and 
always said there was a nice breeze. This sometimes tempted 
the girls, who were bad sailors, to go out sailing, but they always 
regretted it and used to come back saying, " How foolish we 
were to be taken in ! " Hugo and I were good sailors and enjoyed 
the yacht more than anything. John was an expert in the 



MEMBLAND 45 

handling of a yacht, but the " Imp " nearly died of sea-sickness 
if ever he ventured on board. 

Captain Bletchington taught Hugo and myself a song in 
Fiji language. It ran like this : 

" Tang a rang a chicky nee, picky-nicky wooa, 
Tarra iddy ucky chucky chingo." 

Which meant : 

" All up and down the river they did go ; 
The King and Queen of Otahiti." 

I think what we enjoyed most of all were games of Hide- 
and-seek on board. One day one of the sailors hid us by 
reefing us up in a sail in the sail-room, a hiding-place which 
baffled everyone. The Waterwitch was a fast vessel, and won 
the schooners' race round the Isle of Wight one year and only 
narrowly missed winning the Queen's Cup. The story of this 
race used to be told us over and over again by D., and used to be 
enacted by Hugo and me on our toy yachts or with pieces of 
cork in the sink. This is what happened. Another schooner, 
the Cetonia, had to allow the Waterwitch five minutes, but the 
Waterwitch had to allow the Sleuthhound, a cutter, twenty-five 
minutes. D. was watching from the shore, and my mother was 
watching from the R.Y.S. Club. The Cetonia came in first, 
but a minute or two later the Waterwitch sailed in before the 
five minutes' allowance was up. Then twenty minutes of 
dreadful suspense rolled by, twenty-three minutes, and during 
the last two minutes, as D. dramatically said, " That 'orrid 
Sleuthhound sailed round the corner and won the race." Hugo 
and I felt we could never forgive the owner of the Sleuthhound. 

Besides the Waterwitch there was a little steam launch called 
the Wasp which used to take us in to Plymouth, and John had a 
sailing-boat of his own. 



CHAPTER IV 
MEMBLAND 

IN the summer holidays of 1883 Mr. Warre came to staj- 
with us. John, Cecil, and Everard were at his house at 
Eton. Cecil was to read with him during the holidays. 
Cecil was far the cleverest one of the family and a classical 
scholar. 

Mr. Warre was pleased to find I was interested in the stories 
of the Greek heroes, but pained because I only knew their names 
in French, speaking of Thesee, Medee, and Egee. The truth 
being that I did not know how to pronounce their names in 
English, as I had learnt all about them from Cherie. Cherie 
said that Mr. Warre had "une tete bien equilibree." We per- 
formed Les Enfant s d'Edouard before him. 

The following Christmas, Mr. Warre sent Hugo a magnificent 
book illustrating" the song " Apples no more," with water-colour 
drawings done by his daughter ; and he sent me Church's Stories 
from Homer, with this Latin inscription at the beginning of it : 

MAURICIO BARING 

Jam ab ineunte aetate 

Veterum fautori 

antiquitatis studioso 

Maeonii carminis argumenta 

Anglice enucleata 

Strenia propitia 

MITTIT 

EDMUNDUS WARRE 

Kal. Jan. 

mdccclxxxiii. 

Nobody in the house knew what the Latin word strenia 
meant, not even Walter Durnford, who w r as then an Eton 
master and destined to be the house tutor of Hugo and myself 

later. But Cherie at once said it meant the feast of the New 

46 



MEMBLAND 



47 



Year. The scholars were puzzled and could not conceive how 
she had known this. The French word etrennes had given her 
the clue. 

The whole of my childhood was a succession of crazes for 
one thing after another : the first one, before I was three, was a 
craze for swans, then came trains, then chess, then carpentry, 
then organs and organ -building. My mother played chess, and 
directly I learnt the game I used to make all the visitors play with 
me. My mother used to say that she had once bet my Aunt 
Effie she would beat her twenty-one games running, giving her a 
pawn every time. She won twenty games and was winning the 
twenty-first, late one night after dinner, when my father said 
they had played long enough, and must go to bed, which of 
course they refused to do. He then upset the board, and my 
mother said she had never been so angry in her life ; she had 
bent back his little finger and had, she hoped, really hurt him. 

I can remember playing chess and beating Admiral Glyn, 
who came over from Plymouth. His ship was the Agincourt, 
a large four-funnelled ironclad. One day we had luncheon on 
board, and my father was chaffed for an unforgettable solecism, 
namely, for having smoked on the quarter-deck. 

Another craze was history. Cherie gave the girls a most 
interesting historical task, which was called doing Le Steele de 
Pericles and Le Steele de Louis XIV., or whose-ever the century 
might be. 

You wrote on one side of a copy-book the chief events and 
dates of the century in question, and on the other side short 
biographies of the famous men who adorned it, with comments 
on their deeds or works. I implored to be allowed to do this, 
and in a large sprawling handwriting I struggled with Le Siecle 
de Pericles, making up for my want of penmanship by the 
passionate admiration I felt for the great men of the past. My 
History of the World was the opposite to that of Mr. H. G. Wells ! 

Somebody gave me an American History of the World, a 
large flat book which told the histories of all the countries of 
the world in the form of a pictured chart, the countries being 
represented by long, narrow belts or strips, so that you could 
follow the destinies of the various Empires running parallel 
to each other and see the smaller countries being absorbed by 
the greater. The whole book was printed on a long, large, 
glazed linen sheet, which you could pull out all at one time 



48 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

if you had a room long enough and an unencumbered door. 
You could also turn over the doubly folded leaves. That was 
the more convenient way, although you did not get the full 
effect. This book was a mine of interest. It had pictures of 
every kind of side-issue and by -event, such as the Seven 
Wonders of the World, the Coliseum, pictures of crusaders, and 
portraits of famous men. 

About the same time a friend of Cecil's, Claud Lambton, 
gave me an historical atlas which was also a great treat. Lessons | 
continued with Cherie, and I used to learn passages of Racine 
(." Le Recit de Theramene ") and of Boileau (" La Mollesse," from 
the Lutriri) by heart, and " Les Imprecations de Camille." I also \ 
read a good deal by myself, but mostly fairy-tales, although I 
there were one or two grown-up books I read and liked. The 
book I remember liking best of all was a novel called Too Strange 
not to be True, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton, which my mother [ 
read out to my cousin, Bessie Burt eel. I thought this a wonder- 
ful book; I painted illustrations for it, making a picture of 
every character. 

There was another book which I read to myself and liked, if 
anything, still better. I found it in Everard's bedroom. It was 
a yellow-backed novel, and it had on the cover the picture of 
a dwarf letting off a pistol. It was called the Siege of Castle 
Something and it was by — that is the question, who was it by ? 
I would give anything to know. The name of the author 
seemed to me at the time quite familiar, that is to say, a name 
one had heard people talk about, like Trollope or Whyte- 
Melville. The story was that of an impecunious family who 
led a gay life in London at a suburban house called the Robber's 
Cave, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were 
always in debt, and finally, to escape bailiffs, they shut them- 
selves up in a castle on the seacoast, where they were safe 
unless a bailiff should succeed in entering the house, and present I 
the writ to one of the debtors in person. The bailiffs tried every 
expedient to force a way into the castle, one of them dressing 
up as an old dowager who was a friend of the family, and driving 
up to the castle in a custard-coloured carriage. But the inmates 
of the house were wily, and they had a mechanical device by 
which coloured billiard balls appeared on the frieze of the 
drawing-room and warned them when a bailiff was in the offing. 

One day when they had a visitor to tea, a billiard ball 



MEMBLAND 49 

suddenly made a clicking noise round the frieze. " What is 
that for ? " asked the interested guest. " That," said the 
host, with great presence of mind, "is a signal that a ship is 
in sight." As tea went on, a perfect plethora of billiard balls 
of different colours appeared in the frieze. " There must be 
a great many ships in sight to-day," said the guest. " A great 
many," answered the host. 

Whether a bailiff ever got into the house I don't know. The 
picture on the cover seems to indicate that he did. The book 
was in Everard's cupboard for years, and then, "suddenly, 
as rare things will, it vanished." I never have been able to find 
it again, although I have never stopped looking for it. Once 
I thought I had run it to earth. I once met at the Vice-Provost 's 
house at Eton a man who was an expert lion-hunter and who 
seemed to have read every English novel that had ever been 
published. I described him the book. He had read it. He 
remembered the picture on the cover and the story, but, alas ! 
he could recall neither its name nor that of the author. 

In French Les Malheur s de Sophie, Les Memoirs d'un Ane, 
Sans Famille, were the first early favourites, and then the 
numerous illustrated works of Jules Verne. 

Walter Scott's novels used to be held before us like an 
alluring bait. " When you are nine years old you shall read 
The Talisman." Even the order in which Scott was to be read 
was discussed. The Talisman first, and then Ivanhoe, and then 
Quentin Durward, Woodstock and Kenilworth, Rob Roy and Guy 
Mannering. 

The reading of the Waverley Novels was a divine, far-off 
event, to which all one's life seemed to be slowly moving, and 
as soon as I was nine my mother read out The Talisman to me. 
The girls had read all W T alter Scott except, of course, The Heart 
of Midlothian, which was not, as they said, for the J. P. (jeune 
per sonne) and (but why not, I don't know) The Peveril of the 
Peak. They also read Miss Yonge's domestic epics. There I 
never followed them, except for reading The Little Duke, The 
Lances of Lynwood, and the historical romance of The Chaplet 
of Pearls, which seemed to me thrilling. 

I believe children absorb more Kultur from the stray grown- 
up conversation they hear than they learn from books. At 
luncheon one heard the grown-up people discussing books and 
Cherie talking of new French novels. Not a word of all this 



5o THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

escaped my notice. I remember the excitement when John 
Inglesant was published and Marion Crawford's Mr. Isaacs and, 
just before I went to school, Treasure Island. 

But besides the books of the day, one absorbed a mass of 
tradition. My father had an inexhaustible memory, and he 
would quote to himself when he was in the train, and at any 
moment of stress and emotion a muttered quotation would 
rise to his lips, often of the most incongruous kind. Some- , 
times it was a snatch of a hymn of Heber's, sometimes a lyric 
of Byron's, sometimes an epitaph of Pope's, some lines of , 
Dryden or Churchill, or a bit of Shakespeare. 

One little poem he was fond of quoting was : 

" Mrs. Gill is very ill 

And nothing can improve her, 
Unless she sees the Tuileries 

And waddles round the Louvre." 

I believe it is by Hook. I remember one twilight at the 3 
end of a long train journey, when Papa, muffled in a large ulster, ; 
kept on saying : 

" False, fleeting, perjured Clarence, 
That stabbed me in the field by Tewkesbury," 

and then Byron's " I saw thee weep," and when it came to 

" It could not match the living rays that filled that glance of thine," 

there were tears in his eyes. Then after a pause he broke into ; 
Cowper's hymn, " Hark my soul," and I heard him whispering : 

" Can a woman's tender care ii 

Cease towards the child she bare ? 
Yes, she may forgetful be, 
Yet will I remember thee." 

But besides quotations from the poets he knew innumerable 
tags, epitaphs, epigrams, which used to come out on occasions : 
Sidney Smith's receipt for a salad ; Miss Fanshawe's riddle, 
" 'Twas whispered in heaven, 'twas muttered in hell " ; and 
many other poems of this nature. 

My father spoke French and German and Spanish. He 
knew many of Schiller's poems by heart. Soon after he was 
married, he bet my mother a hundred pounds that she would 
not learn Schiller's poem " Die Glocke " by heart. My mother 



MEMBLAND 51 

did not know German. The feat was accomplished, but the 
question was how was he to be got to hear her repeat the poem, 
for, whenever she began he merely groaned and said, " Don't, 
don't." One day they were in Paris and had to drive some- 
where, a long drive into the suburbs which was to take an 
hour or more, and my mother began, " Fest gemauert in der 
Erde," and nothing would stop her till she came to the end. 
She won her hundred pounds. And when my father's silver 
wedding came about, in 1886, he was given a silver bell with 
some lines of the " Glocke " inscribed on it. 

Mrs. Christie was decidedly of the opinion that we ought to 
learn German, and so were my father and mother, but German 
so soon after the Franco-Prussian War was a sore subject in the 
house owing to Cherie, who cried when the idea of learning 
German was broached, and I remember one day hearing my 
mother tell Mrs. Christie that she simply couldn't do it. So 
much did I sympathise with Cherie that I tore out a picture of 
Bismarck from a handsome illustrated volume dealing with 
the Franco-Prussian War — an act of sympathy that Cherie 
never forgot. So my father and mother sadly resigned them- 
selves, and it was settled we were not to learn German. I heard 
a great deal about German poetry all the same, and one of 
the outstanding points in the treasury of traditions that I 
amassed from listening to what my father and mother said 
was that Goethe was a great poet. I knew the story of Faust 
from a large illustrated edition of that work which used to lie 
about at Coombe. 

But perhaps the most clearly defined of all the traditions 
that we absorbed were those relating to the actors and the 
singers of the past, especially to the singers. My father was 
no great idolator of the past in the matter of acting, and he 
told me once that he imagined Macready and the actors of his 
time to have been ranters. 

It was French acting he preferred — the art of Got, Delaunay, 
and Coquelin — although Fechter was spoken of with enthu- 
siasm, and many of the English comedians, the Wigans, Mrs. 
Keeley, Sam Sothern, Buckstone. The Bancrofts and Hare 
and Mrs. Kendal he admired enormously, and Toole made him 
shake with laughter. 

At a play he either groaned if he disliked the acting or shook 
with laughter if amused, or cried if he was moved. Irving 



52 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

made him groan as Romeo or Benedict, but he admired him in 
melodrama and character parts, and as Shylock, while Ellen 
Teriy melted him, and when he saw her play Macbeth, he kept 
on murmuring, "The dear little child." But it was the musical 
traditions which were the more important — the old days of 
Italian Opera, the last days of the bel canto — Mario and Grisi 
and, before them, Ronconi and Rubini and Tamburini. 

My mother was never tired of telling of Grisi flinging herself 
across the door in the Lucrezia Borgia, dressed in a parure 
of turquoises, and Mario singing with her the duet in the 
Huguenots. Mario, they used to say, was a real tenor, and had 
the right methode. None of the singers who came afterwards 
was allowed to be a real tenor. Jean de Reske was emphatic- 
ally not a real tenor. None of the German school had any 
methode. I suppose Caruso would have been thought a real 
tenor, but I doubt if his methode would have passed muster. 
There was one singer who had no voice at all, but who was 
immensely admired and venerated because of his methode. I 
think his name was Signor Brizzi. He was a singing-master, 
and I remember saying that I preferred a singer who had just a 
little voice. 

My father loathed modern German Opera. Mozart , Donizetti, 
Rossini, and Verdi enchanted him, and my mother, steeped in 
classical music as she was, preferred Italian operas to all others. 
Patti was given full marks both for voice and methode, and 
Trebelli, Albani, and Neilsen were greatly admired. But 
Wagner was thought noisy, and Faust and Carmen alone of 
more modern operas really tolerated. 

Sometimes my mother would teach me the accompaniments 
of the airs in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, while she played 
on the concertina, and she used always to say : " Do try and 
get the bass right." The principle was, and I believe it to 
be a sound one, that if the bass is right, the treble will take 
care of itself. What she and my Aunt M'aimee called playing 
with a foolish bass was as bad as driving a pony with a loose 
rein, which was for them another unpardonable sin. 

On the French stage, tradition went back as far as Rachel, 
although my mother never saw her, and I don't think my 
father did ; but Desclee was said to be an incomparable artist, 
of the high-strung, nervous, delicate type. The accounts of 
her remind one of Elenora Duse, whose acting delighted my 



MEMBLAND 53 

father when he saw her. " Est-elle jolie ? " someone said of 
Desclee. " Non, elle est pire." 

Another name which meant something definite to me was 
that of Fargeuil, who I imagine was an intensely emotional 
actress with a wonderful charm of expression and utterance. 
My father was never surprised at people preferring the new to 
the old. He seemed to expect it, and when I once told him later 
that I preferred Stevenson to Scott, a judgment I have since 
revised and reversed, he was not in the least surprised, and said : 
" Of course, it must be so; it is more modern." But he was 
glad to find I enjoyed Dickens, laughed at Pickwick, and 
thought Vanity Fair an interesting book, when I read these 
books later at school. 

We were taken to see some good acting before I went to 
school. We saw the last performances of School and Ours at 
the Haymarket with the Bancrofts. My mother always spoke 
of Mrs. Bancroft as Marie Wilton : we saw Hare in The Colonel 
and the Quiet Rubber ; Mrs. Kendal in the Ironmaster, and Sarah 
Bernhardt in Hernani. She had left the Theatre francais 
then, and was acting with her husband, M. Damala. This, 
of course, was the greatest excitement of all, as I knew many 
passages of the play, and the whole of the last act by heart. 
I can remember now Sarah's exquisite modulation of voice 
when she said : 

" Tout s'est eteint, flambeaux et musique de fete, 
Rien que la nuit et nous, felicite parfaite." 

The greatest theatrical treat of all was to go to the St. James's 
Theatre, because Mr. Hare was a great friend of the family and 
used to come and stay at Membland, so that when we went to his 
theatre we used to go behind the scenes. I saw several of his 
plays : Pinero's Hobby Horse, Lady Clancarty, and the first 
night of As You Like It. This was on Saturday, 24th January 
1885. 

One night we were given the Queen's box at Covent Garden 
by Aunt M'aimee, and we went to the opera. It was Aida. 

We also saw Pasca in La joie fait peur, so that the tradition 
that my sisters could hand on to their children was linked with 
a distant past. 

When Mary Anderson first came to London we went to see 
her in the Lady of Lyons, and never shall I forget her first 



54 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

entrance on the stage. This was rendered the more impressive 
by an old lady with white hair making an entrance just before 
Mary Anderson, and Cecil, who was with us, pretending to think 
she was Mary Anderson, and saying with polite resignation that 
she was a little less young than he had expected. When Mary 
Anderson did appear, her beauty took our breath away ; she 
was dressed in an Empire gown with her hair done in a pinnacle, 
and she looked like a picture of the Empress Josephine : radiant 
with youth, and the kind of beauty that is beyond and above 
discussion ; eyes like stars, classic arms, a nobly modelled face, 
and matchless grace of carriage. Next year we all went in a box 
to see her in Pygmalion and Galatea, a play that I was never 
tired of reproducing afterwards on my toy theatre. 

As I grew older, I remember going to one or two grown-up 
parties m London. One was at Grosvenor House, a garden 
party, with, I think, a bazaar going on. There was a red-coated 
band playing in the garden, and my cousin, Betty Ponsonby 
who was there, asked me to go and ask the band to play a valse 
called '* Jeunesse Doree." I did so, spoke to the bandmaster 
and walked to the other end of the lawn. To my surprise I saw 
the whole band following me right across the lawn, and taking 
up a new position at the place I had gone to. Whether they 
thought I had meant they could not be heard where they were, 
I don't know, but I was considerably embarrassed ; so, I think' 
was my cousin, Betty. 

Another party I remember was at Stafford House. My 
mother was playing the violin in an amateur ladies' string-band 
conducted by Lady Folkestone. My cousin, Bessie Bulteel! 
had to accompany Madame Neruda in a violin solo and pianoforte 
duet . The Princess of Wales and the three little princesses were 
sitting in the front row on red velvet chairs. The Princess of 
Wales in her orders and jewels seemed to me, and I am sure to 
all the grown-up people as well, like the queen of a fairy-tale 
who had strayed by chance into the world of mortals ; she was 
different and more graceful than anyone else there. 

There is one kind of beauty which sends grown-up people 
mto raptures, but which children are quite blind to ; but there 
is another and rarer order of beauty which, while it amazes the 
grown-up and makes the old cry, binds children with a spell, 
it is an order of beauty in which the grace of every movement, 
the radiance of the smile, and the sure promise of lasting youth 



MEMBLAND 55 

in the cut of the face make you forget all other attributes, how- 
ever perfect. 

Of such a kind was the grace and beauty of the Princess of 
Wales. She was as lovely then as Queen Alexandra. 

I was taken by my father in my black velvet suit. I was 
sitting on a chair somewhere at the end of a row, and couldn't 
see very well. One of the little princesses smiled at me and 
beckoned to me, so I boldly walked up and sat next to them, 
and the Princess of Wales then took me on her knee/ greatly to 
the surprise of my mother when she walked on to the platform 
with the band. The audience was splendid and crowded with 
jewelled beauties, and I remember one of the grown-ups asking 
another : " Which do you admire most, Lady Clarendon or Lady 
Someone else ? " 

Another party I remember was an afternoon party at Sir 
Frederick Leighton's house, with music. Every year he gave 
this party, and every year the same people were invited. The 
music was performed by the greatest artists : Joachim, Madame 
Neruda, Piatti the violoncellist, and the best pianists|ofJhe 
day, in a large Moorish room full of flowers. It was the most 
intimate of concerts. The audience, which was quite small, 
used to sit in groups round the pianoforte, and only in the 
more leisurely London of the 'eighties could you have had such 
an exquisite performance and so naturally cultivated, so un- 
affectedly musical an audience. The Leighton party looked 
like a Du Maurier illustration. 

When we were in London my father would sometimes come 
back on Saturday afternoons with a present for one of us, not a 
toy, but something much more rare and fascinating — a snuff-box 
that opened with a trick, or a bit of china. These were kept for 
us by Cherie in a cupboard till we should be older. One day 
he took out of a vitrine a tiny doll's cup of dark blue Sevres 
which belonged to a large service and gave it me, and I have 
got it now. But the present I enjoyed more than any I have 
ever received in my life, except, perhaps, the fifty-shilling train, 
was one day when we were walking down a path at Membland, 
he said : " This is your path ; I give it to you and the gate at the 
end." It was the inclusion of the little iron gate at the end 
which made that present poignantly perfect. 

There was no end to my father's generosity. His gifts were 
on a large scale and reached far and wide. He used to collect 



56 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Breguet watches ; but he did not keep them ; he gave them 
away to people whom he thought would like one. He had a 
contempt for half measures, and liked people to do the big 
thing on a large scale. " So-and-so," he used to say, " has be- 
haved well." That meant had been big and free-handed, and 
above small and mean considerations. He liked the best : the 
old masters, a Turner landscape, a Velasquez, a Watteau ; 
good furniture, good china, good verse, and good acting ; 
Shakespeare, which he knew by heart, so if you went with 
him to a play such as Hamlet, he could have prompted the 
players ; Schiller, Juvenal, Pope, and Dryden and Byron ; the 
acting of the Comedie francaise, and Ellen Terry's diction 
and pathos. Tennyson was spoilt for him by the mere exist- 
ence of the " May Queen " ; but when he saw a good modern 
thing, he admired it. He said that Mrs. Patrick Campbell 
in her performance of Mrs. Ebbsmith, which we went to the 
first night of, was a real Erscheinung, and when all the pictures 
of Watts were exhibited together at Burlington House he 
thought that massed performance was that of a great man. 
He was no admirer of Burne -Jones, but the four pictures of 
the " Briar Rose " struck him as great pictures. 

He was quite uninsular, and understood the minds and the 
ways of foreigners. He talked foreign languages not only 
easily, but naturally, without effort or affectation, and native 
turns of expression delighted him, such as a German saying, 
" Lieber Herr Oberkellner," or, as I remember, a Frenchman 
saying after a performance of a melodrama at a Casino where 
the climax was rather tamely executed, " Ce coup de pistolet 
etait un peu mince." And once I won his unqualified praise by 
putting at the end of a letter, which I had written to my Italian 
master at Florence, and which I had had to send via the city 
in order to have a money order enclosed with it, " Abbi la 
gentilezza di mandarmi un biglettino." This use of a diminu- 
tive went straight to my father's heart. Nothing amused him 
more than instances of John Bullishness ; for instance, a young 
man who once said to him at Contrexeville : " I hate abroad." 

He conformed naturally to the customs of other countries, 
and as he had travelled all over the world, he was familiar with 
the mind and habit of every part of Europe. He was com- 
pletely unselfconscious, and was known once when there was 
a ball going on in his own house at Charles Street to have 



MEMBLAND 57 

disappeared into his dressing-room, undressed, and walked in 
his dressing-gown through the dining-room, where people were 
having supper, with a bedroom candle in his hand to the back 
staircase to go up to his bedroom. His warmth of heart was > 
like a large generous fire, and the people who warmed their 
hands at it were without number. 

With all his comprehension of foreigners and their ways, he 
was intensely English ; and he was at home in every phase of 
English life, and nowhere more so than pottering about farms 
and fields on his grey cob, saying: "The whole of that fence 
must come down — every bit of it," or playing whist and saying 
about his partner, one of my aunts : " Good God, what a fool 
the woman is ! " 

Whist reminds me of a painful episode. I have already 
said that I learnt to play long whist in the housekeeper's room. 
I was proud of my knowledge, and asked to play one night after 
dinner at Membland with the grown-ups. They played short 
whist. I got on all right at first, and then out of anxiety I 
revoked. Presently my father and mother looked at each other, 
and a mute dialogue took place between them, which said 
clearly : " Has he revoked ? " " Yes, he has." They said 
nothing about it, and when the rubber was over my father said : 
" The dear little boy played very nicely." But I minded their 
not knowing that I knew that they knew, almost as much as 
having revoked. It was a bitter mortification — a real humilia- 
tion. Later on when I was bigger and at school, the girls and 
I used to play every night with my father, and our bad play, 
which never improved, made him so impatient that we in- 
vented a code of signals saying, " Bechez" when we wanted 
spades to lead, and other words for the other suits. 

A person whom we were always delighted to see come into 
the house was our Uncle Johnny. When we were at school he 
always tipped us. If we were in London he always suggested 
going to a play and taking all the stalls. 

When we went out hunting with the Dartmoor foxhounds 
he always knew exactly what the fox was going to do, and where 
it was going. And he never bothered one at the Meet. I 
always thought the Meet spoilt the fun of hunting. Every 
person one knew used to come up, say that either one's girths 
were too tight or one's stirrups too long or too short, and set 
about making some alteration. I was always a bad horseman, 



58 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

although far better as a child than as a grown-up person. And 
I knew for certain that if there was an open gate with a crowd 
going through it, my pony would certainly make a dart, through 
that crowd, the gate would be slammed and I should not be 
able to prevent this happening, and there would be a chorus 
of curses. But under the guidance of Uncle Johnny everything 
always went well. 

Whenever he came to Membland, the first thing he would 
do would be to sit down and write a letter. He must have had 
a vast correspondence. Then he would tell stories in Devon- 
shire dialect which were inimitable. 

There are some people who, directly they come into the 
room, not by anything they say or do, not by any display of 
high spirits or effort to amuse, make everything brighter and 
more lively and more gay, especially for children, and Uncle 
Johnny was one of those. As the Bulteel family lived close to 
us, we saw them very often. They all excelled at games and 
at every kind of outdoor sport . The girls were fearless riders and 
drivers and excellent cricketers. Cricket matches at Membland 
were frequent in the summer. Many people used to drive from 
Plymouth to play lawn-tennis at Pamflete, the Bulteels' house. 

We saw most of Bessie Bulteel, who was the eldest girl. She 
was a brilliant pianist, with a fairylike touch and electric execu- 
tion, and her advent was the greatest treat of my childhood. 
She told thrilling ghost stories, which were a fearful joy, but 
which made it impossible for me to pass a certain piece of 
Italian furniture on the landing which had a painted Triton on 
it. It looks a very harmless piece of furniture now. I saw it 
not long ago in my brother Cecil's house. It is a gilt writing- 
table painted with varnished figures, nymphs and fauns, in the 
Italian manner. The Triton sprawls on one side of it recumbent 
beside a cool source. Nothing could be more peaceful or idyllic, 
but I remember the time when I used to rush past it on the 
passage in blind terror. 

A picturesque figure, as of another age, was my great-aunt, 
Lady Georgiana Grey, who came to Membland once in my child- 
hood. She was old enough to have played the harp to Byron. 
She lived at Hampton Court and played whist every night of 
her life, and sometimes went up to London to the play when 
she was between eighty and ninety. She was not deaf, her 
sight was undimmed, and she had a great contempt for people 



MEMBLAND 59 

who were afraid of draughts. She had a fine aptitude for fiat 
contradiction, and she was a verbal conservative, that is to say, 
she had a horror of modern locutions and abbreviations, piano 
for pianoforte, balcony for balconi, cucumber for cowcumber, 
Montagu for Mountagu, soot for sut, yellow for yallow. 

She wore on her little finger an antique onyx ring with a 
pig engraved on it, and I asked her to give it me. She said : 
" You shall have it when you are older." An hour later I went 
up to her room and said : " I am older now. Can I have the 
ring ? " She gave it me. Nobody ever sat at a table so bolt 
upright as she did, and she lived to be ninety-nine. She came 
back once to Membland after my sisters were married. 

Perhaps the greatest excitement of all our Membland life 
was when the whole of the Harbord family, our cousins, used to 
arrive for Christmas. Our excitement know no bounds when 
we knew they were coming, and Cherie used to get so tired of 
hearing the Harbords quoted that I remember her one day 
in the schoolroom in London opening the window, taking the 
lamp to it and saying: " J'ouvre cette fenetre pour eclairer 
la famille Harbord." 

On rainy days at Membland there were two rare treats : 
one was to play hide-and-seek all over the house ; the other was 
to make toffee and perhaps a gingerbread cake in the still- 
room. The toffee was the ultra-sticky treacle kind, and the 
cake when finished and baked always had a wet hole in the 
middle of it. Hugo and I used to spend a great deal of time in 
Mr. Ellis' carpenter's shop. We had tool-boxes of our own, and 
we sometimes made Christmas presents for our father and 
mother ; but our carpentry was a little too imaginative and 
rather faulty in execution. 

Not far from Membland and about a mile from Pamflete 
there was a small grey Queen Anne house called " Mothecombe." 
It nestled on the coast among orchards and quite close to the 
sandy beach of Mothecombe Bay, the only sandy beach on our 
part of the South Devon coast. This house belonged to the 
Mildmays, and we often met the Mildmay family when we went 
over there for picnics. 

Aunt Georgie Mildmay was not only an expert photographer, 
but she was one of the first of those rare people who have 
had a real talent for photography and achieved beautiful and 
artistic results with it, both in portraits and landscapes. 



60 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Whenever Hugo and I used to go and see her in London at 
46 Berkeley Square, where she lived, she always gave us a 
pound, and never a holiday passed without our visiting Aunt 
Georgie. 

Mothecombe was often let or lent to friends in summer. One 
summer Lady de Grey took it, and she came over to luncheon at 
Membland, a vision of dazzling beauty, so that, as someone said, 
you saw green after looking at her. It was like looking at the 
sun. The house was often taken by a great friend of our family, 
Colonel Ellis, who used to spend the summer there with his 
family, and he frequently stayed at Membland with us. I 
used to look forward to going down to dinner when he was there, 
and listening to his conversation. He was the most perfect 
of talkers, because he knew what to say to people of all ages, 
besides having an unending flow of amusing things to tell, 
for he made everything he told amusing, and he would some- 
times take the menu and draw me a picture illustrating the 
games and topics that interested us at the moment. We had 
a game at one time which was to give someone three people 
they liked equally, and to say those three people were on the 
top of a tower ; one you could lead down gently by the hand, 
one you must kick down, and the third must be left to be 
picked by the crows. 

We played this one evening, and the next day Colonel Ellis 
appeared with a charming pen-and-ink drawing of a Louis- 
Quinze Marquis leading a poudre lady gently by the hand. If 
he gave one a present it would be something quite unique — 
unlike what anyone else could think of ; once it was, for me, a 
silver mug with a twisted handle and my name engraved on it 
in italics, "Maurice Baring's Mug, 1885." His second son, 
Gerald, was a little bit older than I was, and we were great 
friends. Gerald had a delightfully grown-up and blase manner 
as a child, and one day, with the perfect manner of a man of 
the world, he said to me, talking of Queen Victoria, " The fact is, 
the woman's raving mad." 

We used to call Colonel Ellis " the gay Colonel " to care- 
fully distinguish him from Colonel Edgecumbe, whom we 
considered a more serious Colonel. The Mount Edgecumbes 
were neighbours, and lived just over the Cornish border at 
Mount Edgecumbe. Colonel Edgecumbe was Lord Mount 
Edgecumbe 's brother, and often stayed with us. He used to 



MEMBLAND 61 

be mercilessly teased, especially by the girls of the Bulteel 
family. One year he was shooting with us and the Bulteels 
got hold of his cartridges and took out the shot, leaving a 
few good cartridges. 

He was put at the hot corner. Rocketing pheasants in 
avalanches soared over his head, and he, of course, missed 
them nearly all, shooting but one or two. He explained for 
the rest of the day that it was a curious thing, and that some- 
thing must be wrong, either with his eyes or with the climate. 
Some new way of tormenting was always found, and, although 
he was not the kind of man who naturally enjoys a practical 
joke, he bore it angelically. 

His sister, Lady Ernestine, was rather touchy in the matter 
of Devonshire clotted cream. As Mount Edgecumbe was just 
over the border in Cornwall, and as clotted cream was made in 
Cornwall as well as in Devonshire, she resented its being called 
Devonshire cream and used to call it Cornish cream ; but when 
she stayed with us, not wishing to concede the point and yet 
unwilling to hurt our feelings, she used to call it West -country 
cream. 

Another delightful guest was Miss Pinkie Browne, who was 
Irish, gay, argumentative, and contradictious, with smiling 
eyes, her hair in a net, and an infectious laugh. As a girl she 
had broken innumerable hearts, but had always refused to 
marry, as she never could make up her mind. She was ex- 
tremely musical, and used to sing English and French songs, 
accompanying herself, with an intoxicating lilt and a languishing 
expression. As Dr. Smyth says about Tosti's singing, it was 
small art, but it was real art. And her voice must have had a 
rare quality, as she was about fifty when I heard her. Such 
singing is far more enjoyable than that of professional singers, 
and makes one think of Tosti's saying : " Le chant est un true." 
She would make a commonplace song poignantly moving. She 
used to sing a song called " The Conscript's Farewell " : 

" You are going far away, far away, from poor Jeanette, 
There's no one left to love me now, and you will soon forget] " 

of which the refrain was : 

" Oh, if I were Queen of France, 
Or still better Pope of Rome, 
I would have no fighting men abroad, 
No weeping maids at home." 



62 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Membland was always full of visitors. There were visitors 
at Easter, visitors at Whitsuntide, in the autumn for the shoot- 
ing, and a houseful at Christmas : an uncle, General Baring, 
who used to shoot with one arm because he had lost the other 
in the Crimea ; my father's cousin, Lord Ashburton, who was 
particular about his food, and who used to say: "That's a 
very good dish, but it's not veau a la bourgeoise " ; Godfrey 
Webb, who always wrote a little poem in the visitors' book when 
he went away ; Lord Granville, who knew French so alarmingly 
well, and used to ask one the French for words like a big stone 
upright on the edge of a road and a ship tacking, till one longed 
to say, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland : " What's 
the French for fiddle de dee ? " ; Lord and Lady Lansdowne, 
Mr. and Mrs. Percy Wyndham — Mr. Wyndham used to take me 
out riding ; he was deliciously inquisitive, so that if one was 
laughing at one side of the table he would come to one quietly 
afterwards and ask what the joke had been about ; Harry 
Cust, radiant with youth and spirits and early success ; Lady de 
Clifford and her two daughters (Katie and Maud Russell), she 
carrying an enormous silk bag with her work in it — she was a 
kind critic of our French plays ; Lady Airlie, and her sister, 
Miss Maude Stanley, who started being a vegetarian in the 
house, and told me that Henry viii. was a much misunderstood 
monarch ; Madame Neruda, and once, long before she married 
him, Sir Charles Halle. Sir Charles Halle used to sit down 
at the pianoforte after dinner, and nothing could dislodge him. 
Variation followed variation, and repeat followed repeat of the 
stiffest and driest classical sonatas. And one night when this 
had been going on past midnight, my father, desperate with 
impatience and sleep, put out the electric light. I am not 
making an anachronism in talking of electric light, as it had 
just been put in the house, and was thought to be a most daring 
innovation. 

We had a telegraph office in the house, which was worked 
by Mrs. Tudgay. It was a fascinating instrument, rather like 
a typewriter with two dials and little steel keys round one of 
them, and the alphabet was the real alphabet and not the 
Morse Code. It was convenient having this in the house, but 
one of the results was that so many jokes were made with it, 
and so many bogus telegrams arrived, that nobody knew 
whether a telegram was a real one or not. 



MEMBLAND 63 

Mr. Walter Durnford, then an Eton House master, and 
afterwards Provost of Kings, in a poem he wrote in the 
visitors' book, speaks of Membland as a place where every- 
thing reminded you of the presence of fairy folk, " Where 
telegrams come by the dozen, concocted behind the door." 

Certainly people enjoyed themselves at Membland, and the 
Christmas parties were one long riot of dance, song, and laughter. 
Welcome ever smiled at Membland, and farewell went out 
sighing. 

As I got nearer and nearer to the age of ten, when it was 
settled that I should go to school, life seemed to become more 
and more wonderful every day. Both at Membland and in 
Charles Street the days went by in a crescendo of happiness. 
Walks with Cherie in London were a daily joy, especially when 
we went to Covent Garden and bought chestnuts to roast for 
tea. The greatest tea treat was to get Cherie, who was an 
inspired cook, to make something she called la petite sauce. 
You boiled eggs hard in the kettle ; and then, in a little china 
frying-pan over a spirit lamp, the sauce was made, of butter, 
cream, vinegar, pepper, and the eggs were cut up and floated 
in the delicious hot mixture. A place of great treats where 
we sometimes went on Saturday afternoons was the Aquarium, 
where acrobats did wonderful things, and you had your bumps 
told and your portrait cut out in back-and-white silhouette. 
The phrenologist was not happy in his predictions of my future, 
as he said I had a professional and mathematical head, and 
would make a good civil engineer in after-life. 

Going to the play was the greatest treat of all, and if I 
heard there was any question of their going to the play down- 
stairs, and Mr. Deacon, my father's servant, always used to 
tell me when tickets were being ordered, I used to go on my 
knees in the night nursery and pray that I might be taken too. 
Sometimes the answer was direct. 

One night my mother and Lord Mount Edgecumbe were 
going to a pantomime together by themselves. Mr. Deacon 
told me, and asked me if I was going too, but nothing had been 
said about it. I prayed hard, and I went down to my mother's 
bedroom as she was dressing for dinner. No word of the panto- 
mime was mentioned on either side. She then, while her hair 
was being done by D., asked for a piece of paper and scribbled 
a note and told me to take it down to mv father. 



64 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

I did so, and my father said : " Would you like to go to the 
pantomime, too ? " The answer was in the affirmative. 

What a fever one would be in to start in time and to be 
there at the beginning on nights when we went to the play! 
how terribly anxious not to miss one moment ! How wonderful 
the moment was before the curtain went up ! The delicious 
suspense, the orchestra playing, and then the curtain rising on 
a scene that sometimes took one's breath away, and how calm 
the grown-up people were. They would not look at the red 
light in the background, the pink sky which looked like a real 
pink sky, or perhaps some moving water. People say some- 
times it is bad for children to go to the theatre, but do they 
ever enjoy anything in after life as much ? Is there any such 
magic as the curtain going up on the Demon's cave in the 
pantomime, or the sight in the Transformation scene of two 
silvery fairies rising from the ground on a gigantic wedding cake, 
and the clown suddenly breaking on the scene, shouting, " Here 
we are again ! " through a shower of gold rain and a cloud of 
different-coloured Bengal lights ? Is there any such pleasure 
as in suddenly seeing and recognising things in the flesh one 
had been familiar with for long from books and stories, such 
as Cinderella's coach, the roc's egg in Sinbad the Sailor, or 
Aladdin's cave, or the historical processions of the kings of 
England, some of whom you clapped and some of whom you 
hissed ? Oh ! the charm of changing scenery ! a ship moving 
or still better sinking, a sunset growing red, a forest growing 
dark ; and then the fun ! The indescribable fun, of seeing 
Cinderella's sisters being knocked about in the kitchen, or 
the Babes in the Wood being put to bed, and kicking all 
their bedclothes off directly they had settled down ; or best 
of all, the clown striking the pantaloon with the red-hot 
poker and the harlequin getting the better of the policeman ! 
Harry Paine was the clown in those days, and he used, in a 
hoarse voice, to say to the pantaloon : " I say, Joey." " Yes, 
master," answered the pantaloon in a feeble falsetto. 

Childhood bereft of such treats I cannot help thinking must 
be a sad affair ; and it generally happens that if children are 
not allowed to go to the play, so that they shall enjoy it more 
when they are grown-up, they end by never being able to 
enjoy it at all. 

One great event of the summer was the Eton and Harrow 



THE MEMBLAND 65 

match, when Cecil and Everard used to come up from Eton with 
little pieces of light blue silk in their black coats. John had 
gone to Cambridge, and I hardly remember him as an Eton boy. 
We used to go on a coach belonging to some friends, and one year 
one of the Parkers bowled three of the Harrow boys running. 

As Cherie had been with Lord Macclesfield in the Parker 
family before she came to us, and as this boy, Alex Parker, had 
either been or nearly been one of her pupils, she had a kind of 
reflected glory from the event. 

Eton was always surrounded with a glamour of romance. 
John had rowed stroke in the Eton eight, and when Cecil rose 
to the dignity of being Captain of the Oppidans we were 
proud indeed. One summer we all went down to Eton for 
the 4th of June. 

We went to speeches and had tea in Cecil's room, and straw- 
berry messes, and walked about in the playing-fields and saw 
the procession of boats and the fireworks. 

From that day I was filled with a longing to go to Eton, 
and resented bitterly having to go to a private school first. 

Another exciting event I remember was a visit to Windsor, 
to the Norman Tower in Windsor Castle, where my uncle, 
Henry Ponsonby, and my Aunt M'aimee lived. This happened 
one year in the autumn. We stayed a Sunday there. The 
house was, for a child, fraught with romance and interest. First 
of all there were the prisons. My aunt had discovered and laid 
bare the stone walls of two octagonal rooms in the tower which 
had been prisons in the olden times for State prisoners, and she 
had left the walls bare. There were on them inscriptions 
carved by the prisoners. She had made these two rooms her 
sitting-rooms, and they were full of books, and there was a 
carpenter's bench in one of these rooms, with a glass of water on 
it ready for painting. 

Windsor was itself exciting enough, but I think what struck 
me most then was the toy cupboard of the boys, Fritz, Johnny, 
and Arthur. All their toys were arranged in tiers in a little 
windowless room, a tier belonging to each separate boy, and in 
the middle of each beautiful and symmetrical arrangement 
there were toys representing a little room with a table and lamp 
on it. As if all this was not exciting enough, my Cousin Betty 
told me the story of the Corsican Brothers. 

Before I went to school my father had to go to Contrexe- 
5 



66 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

ville to take the waters. My father and mother took me with 
them. I faintly regretted not playing a solo at Mademoiselle 
Ida's pupils' concert, which was to have been part of the pro- 
gramme, but otherwise the pleasure and excitement at going 
were unmitigated. We started for Paris in July. Bessie Bulteel 
came with us, and we stopped a night in Paris, at the Hotel 
Bristol. My father took me for a walk in the Rue de la Paix, 
and the next day we went to Contrexeville. I never enjoyed 
anything more in my life than those three weeks at Contrexeville. 
There were shops in the hotel gardens called les Gaieties, where 
a charming old lady, called Madame Paillard, with her daughter, 
Therese, sold the delicious sweets of Nancy, and spoilt me 
beyond words. The grown-up people played at petits chevaux in 
the evening, and as I was not allowed to join in that game, the 
lady of the petits chevaux, Mademoiselle Rose, had a kind of 
rehearsal of the game in the afternoon at half-price, in which 
only I and the actresses of the Casino, whom I made great 
friends with, took part. My special friend was Mademoiselle 
Tusini of the Eldorado Paris Music Hall. She was a songstress. 

One day she asked me to beg Madame Aurele, the directrice of 
the Theatre, to let her sing a song at the Casino which she had 
not been allowed to sing, and which was called " Les allumettes 
du General." Mademoiselle Tusini said it was her greatest 
success, and that when she had sung it at Nancy, nobody knew 
where to look. I pleaded her cause ; but Madame Aurele said, 
" Un jour quand il n'y aura que des Messieurs," so I am afraid 
the song can hardly have been quite nice. When we went away, 
Mademoiselle Tusini gave me a large photograph of herself in 
the role of a commere, carrying a wand. Cherie was slightly 
astonished when she saw it, and when I described the great 
beauty and the wonderful goodness of Mademoiselle Tusini, she 
was not as enthusiastically sympathetic as I could have wished. 

There were a great many French children at Contrexeville, 
and I was allowed to join in their games. There was a charming 
old cure who I made friends with in the village, and his church 
was the first Catholic church I ever entered. 

My mother and father used to go to the Casino play every 
night. I was allowed to go once or twice, as Mademoiselle Tusini 
had threatened to strike if I left Contrexeville without seeing 
her act, so I was taken to Monsieur Choufleury restera chez lui, a 
harmless farce, which is, I believe, often acted by amateurs. 



THE MEMBLAND 67 

We stayed there three weeks, and I left in sorrow and tears. 
We went on for a Nachkur to a place in the Vosges called 
Geradmer, which is near a lake. One day we drove to a place 
called the Schlucht, and saw the stone marking the frontier into 
Alsace, which was, of course, Germany. It was suggested that 
we should cross over, but I, mindful of Cherie, refused to set 
foot on the stolen and violated territory. 

On the way back we stayed a day and night in Paris, and 
bought presents for all those at home. In the evening we went 
to the Theatre f rancais and saw no less an actor than Delaunay 
in Musset's play, On ne badinepas avec V Amour. Delaunay had 
a voice like silver, and his diction on the stage was incomparable. 
I remember Count Benckendorff once saying about him that 
whereas one often bewailed the failure of an actor to look the 
part of a grand seigneur, when one saw Delaunay one wished 
anyone off the stage could be half as distinguished as he was on 
the stage. 

My father took me to the Louvre and showed me the Mona 
Lisa and Watteau's large picture of a Pierrot : " Gilles " and 
the Galerie d'Apollon, and late in the afternoon we drove to 
the Bois de Boulogne. 

Cherie had always told us of the Magasin du Louvre, where 
as children went out they were given, as George, in the poem, 
when he had been as good as gold, an immense balloon. This 
balloon had always been one of my dreams, and we went there, 
and the reality was fully up to all expectations. 

We bought some nonnettes in the Rue St. Honore and a great 
many toys at the Paradis des Enfants. 

The next time I went to Contrexeville I was at school. I wore 
an Eton jacket and a top hat in Paris ; this created a sensation. 
A man said to me in the Rue de Rivoli, " Monsieur a son Gibus." 
I also remember receiving a wonderful welcome in the Galeries. 
With the end of the first visit to Contrexeville I will end 
this chapter, for it was the end of a chapter of life, the happiest 
and most wonderful chapter of all. New gates were opened ; 
but the gate on the fairyland of childhood was shut, and for 
ever afterwards one could only look through the bars, but never 
more be a free and lawful citizen of that enchanted country, 
where life was like a fairy-tale that seemed almost too good to be 
true, and yet so endlessly long and so infinitely happy that it 
seemed as if it must last for ever. 



CHAPTER V 
SCHOOL 

I WENT to school in September 1884. On the 7th of 
September John came of age, and we had a large party 
in the house and a banquet for the tenants in the tennis 
court, at which I had to stand up on a chair and make a speech 
returning thanks for the younger members of the family. I 
travelled up to London with my mother and Mr. Walter Durn- 
ford, and was given Frank Fairleigh to read in the train, but it 
was too grown-up for me, and I only pretended to read it. We 
stayed a night in Charles Street. I was given a brown leather 
dispatch case with my name stamped on it and a framed photo- 
graph of my father and mother and of Membland, and a good 
stock of writing-paper, and the next afternoon we started for 
my school, which was near Ascot. I didn't cry either on 
leaving Membland or at any moment on the day I was taken 
to school. 

We arrived about tea-time. The school was a red brick 
building on the top of the hill, north of Ascot Station, and 
looking towards the station, situated among pine trees. The 
building is there now and is a girls' school. We were shown into 
a drawing-room where the Headmaster and his wife received 
us with a dreadful geniality. There was a small aquarium 
in the room with some goldfish in it. The furniture was 
covered with black-and-yellow cretonne, and there were some 
low ebony bookcases and a great many knick-knacks. Another 
parent was there with a small and pale-looking little boy 
called Arbuthnot, who was the picture of misery, and well 
he might look miserable, as I saw at a glance that he was 
wearing a made-up sailor's tie. Two days later the machinery 
inside this tie was a valuable asset in another boy's collection. 
Conversation was kept up hectically until tea was over. They 
talked of a common friend, Lady Sarah Spencer. " What a 



SCHOOL 69 

charming woman she is ! " said the Headmaster. How sensible 
he seemed to charm ! How impervious to all amenities he 
revealed himself to be later ! Then my mother said good-bye 
to him, and we were taken upstairs by the matron to see my 
cubicle, a little room with pitch-pine walls, partitioned off from 
the next cubicle by a thin wooden partition that did not reach 
the ceiling, so that you could talk to the boy in the next cubicle. 
Boys were not allowed to go into each other's cubicles. We 
hung my solitary picture up, and my mother interviewed 
the matron, Mrs. Otway, in her room and gave her a pound as 
she went away ; then we went out into the garden for a moment. 
My mother said good-bye to me and left me alone. I wandered 
about the garden, which was not a garden but grass hill leading 
down to a cricket -field. Half-way down the hill was a gym- 
nasium, and a high wooden erection with steps. I wondered 
what it was for. The boys had not yet arrived. Two boys 
presently appeared on the scene ; they looked at me, but took 
no great notice. Then after a little time one of them ap- 
proached me, holding in his hand a small pebble surrounded with 
cotton-wool, and asked me if I would like a cuckoo's egg. I 
did not know whether I was supposed to pretend that I thought 
it was a real egg or not. It was so unmistakably a stone. I 
smiled and said nothing. Presently a Chinese gong sounded 
somewhere out of doors. The two boys ran into the house. I 
followed them. On the ground floor of the house there was a 
large hall with a table running down it, a fireplace at one end, 
and at the other end an arch opening on to the staircase draped 
with red curtains with black fleur-de-lys stamped on them. 
There were windows on one side of the room and a cupboard with 
books in on the other. This hall was now full of boys talking 
and laughing. Nobody took the slightest notice of me. They 
then trooped through a passage into the dining-room, a large 
room with tables round three sides of it and a small square 
table in the middle where the Headmaster, his wife, and one of 
the other masters sat. We sat down. I was placed nearly at 
the end of the last table. More boys — those of the first division, 
who were a race apart — came in from another door. Then the 
Headmaster entered, rapped on his table with a knife, and said 
grace. We had tea ; large thick slabs of bread and butter, with 
the butter spread very thinly over them. 

Soon after tea we went to bed, and I dreamt I was at 



70 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Membland, and woke up to find I was in a strange place. The 
boy in the cubicle next to mine was called Hope. He was 
in the second division. In another cubicle opposite to mine 
there was a boy in the first division called Worthington. One 
could talk to them, and they were both of them friendly. 

The next morning after breakfast I was placed in the fourth 
division for Latin and English, and the fourth set for Mathe- 
matics and French, and had my first lesson in Mathematics. 
The first thing the master did was to take a high three-legged 
stool from a corner and exhibit it to us. It had a very narrow 
seat. It was a rickety stool. " This," he said, " is the stool of 
penitence. I hope none of you will have to stand on it." Then 
some figures were written down on the blackboard, and a sum 
in short division was set, which I at once got wrong. In fact, 
I couldn't do it at all. The master came and sat down by my 
side, and said : " You're trembling." So I was. He corrected 
the mistakes and went on to something else. He was terrifying 
to look at, I thought, but perhaps not as frightening as he 
appeared to be. I was a little bit reassured. Later in the 
day we had a French lesson. To my surprise I saw he knew 
but little French, and read out the first page of the elementary 
accidence, pronouncing the French words as though they were 
English ones. 

After luncheon, we played prisoner's base, and I at once 
realised that there is a vast difference between games and play. 
Play is played for fun, but games are deadly serious, and you do 
not play them to enjoy yourselves. Everyone was given two 
blue cards, and every time you were taken prisoner you lost a 
card. If you lost both you were kicked by the captain of the 
side, who said we were a pack of dummies. The first week 
seemed endlessly long, and acute homesickness pervaded every 
moment of it. Waking up in the morning was the worst 
moment. Every night I used to dream I was back at home, 
every morning the moment of waking up was a sharp bewilder- 
ing shock. Our voices were tried, and I was put in the chapel 
choir. The chapel choir had special privileges, but also long 
half-hours of choir practice. 

The masters laughed at me mercilessly for my pronunciation 
of English. I don't know what was wrong with it, except that 
I said yallow, aint for aren't, and ant for aunt, but I did my 
best to get out of this as soon as possible. Apart from idiosyn- 



SCHOOL 71 

crasies of pronunciation, my voice seemed to them comic, and 
they used to imitate me by speaking through their noses when- 
ever I said anything. The boys at first entirely ignored one, 
simply telling one to shut up if one spoke, but the boys in my 
own division soon became friendly, especially an American 
boy called Hamilton Fish the third. Why he had a three after 
his name I don't know. He was the first man to be killed in 
the American-Spanish War in Cuba. There was no bullying. 
One boy, although he was in the first division, was charming, 
and treated one like a grown-up person. This was Basil Black- 
wood. Even then he drew pictures which were the delight 
of his friends. Another boy who was friendly was Niall Camp- 
bell. Dreadful legends were told about Winston Churchill, 
who had been taken away from the school. His naughtiness 
appeared to have surpassed anything. He had been flogged 
for taking sugar from the pantry, and so far from being penitent, 
he had taken the Headmaster's sacred straw hat from where 
it hung over the door and kicked it to pieces. His sojourn at 
this school had been one long feud with authority. The boys 
did not seem to sympathise with him. Their point of view 
was conventional and priggish. 

Every morning there was a short service in the pitch-pine 
school chapel, and every morning an interval between lessons 
called the hour, in which the boys played nondescript games, 
chiefly a game called IT. If you were IT you had to 
catch someone else, and then he became IT. On Sunday 
afternoon we went for a walk. On Sunday evening the Head- 
master read out a book called The Last Allot of Glastonlury, 
which I revelled in. After the first week I had got more or less 
used to my new life. In a fortnight's time I was quite happy 
and enjoying myself ; but every now and then life was marred 
and made hideous for the time being by sudden and unexpected 
dramas. The first drama was that of the Spanish chestnuts. 
There were some Spanish chestnuts lying about in the garden. 
We were told not to eat these. Some of the boys did eat 
them, and one boy gave me a piece of something to eat on the 
end of a knife. It was no bigger than a crumb, and it turned 
out afterwards to be a bit of Spanish chestnut, or at least I 
thought it might have been. One afternoon at tea the Head 
rapped on his table with his knife. There was a dead silence. 
" All boys who have eaten Spanish chestnuts are to stand up." 



72 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Nobody stood up, and there was a long pause. I think the 
boys were puzzled, and did not know they had been eating 
Spanish chestnuts. I certainly did not know a Spanish chestnut 
by sight. I had no chestnut on my conscience. After a very 
long pause the Headmaster made some rather facetious remarks, 
which I thought were meant to encourage us, but the other 
boj^s, knowing him better, knew that they were ironical and 
portended dreadful things. One boy stood up. Then, after a 
slight pause, another ; about four or five boys followed suit. I 
suddenly remembered the incident of the penknife in the 
gymnasium three days before. Could it have been that I had 
eaten a Spanish chestnut ? Was that little bit of white crumb 
on the end of the knife a part of a Spanish chestnut ? I had 
not seen a whole Spanish chestnut anywhere. In any case I 
had better be on the safe side, and I stood up. The Headmaster 
made a cutting comment on boys who were so slow to own up. 
A few more stood up, and that was all. The Head then delivered 
a serious homily. We had been guilty of three things : greed, 
disobedience, and deceit. We would all do two hours' extra 
work on a half-holiday. 

There was electric light in the school, and the electric light 
was oddly enough supposed to be under the charge of one 
of the boys, who was called the Head Engineer. Clever and 
precocious as this boy was, I cannot now believe that his office 
was a serious one, although we took it seriously indeed at 
the time. However that may be, nobody except this boy was 
allowed to go into the engine-shed or to have anything to 
do with the electric light. We were especially forbidden to 
touch any of the switches in the house or ever to turn on or 
off the electric light ourselves. Electric light in houses at 
that time was a new thing, and few private houses were 
lighted with it. One day one of the boys was visited by his 
parents, and he could not resist turning on the electric light 
in one of the rooms to show them what it was like. Unfortun- 
ately the Head saw him do this through the window, and 
directly his parents were gone the boy was flogged. Every 
week the school newspaper appeared. It was edited by two 
of the boys in the first division, and handed round to the 
boys at tea-time. This was a trying and painful moment for 
some of the boys, as there were often in this newspaper 
scathing articles on the cricket or football play of some of 



SCHOOL 73 

the boys written by one of the masters, and all mentioning 
them by name ; and as parents took in the newspaper it was 
far from pleasant to be pilloried in this fashion. Just before 
half-term another drama occurred. I was doing a sum in short 
division, and another boy was waiting for me to go out. He was 
impatient, and he said, " That's right ; don't you see the answer 
is 3456," or whatever it was. I scribbled it down, but unfortun- 
ately had left a mistake in the working, so the answer was right 
and the sum was partly wrong. This was at once detected, 
and I was asked if I had had any help. I said " Yes," and I 
was then accused of having wanted to get marks by unfair 
means, and of having cheated. We did not even know these 
particular sums received marks. The Division Master bit 
his knuckles, and said he would report the matter to the Head- 
master. When I went into chapel from the vestry, robed in a 
white surplice, he pinned a piece of paper with cheat on it, on 
to my back. I was appalled, but as nothing happened immedi- 
ately I began to recover, and on the following Sunday when we 
were writing home the master told me I could put in my Sunday 
letter that I had done very well, and that I was his favourite 
boy. This was only his fun, but I took it quite seriously, and I 
did not put it in my letter, because I thought the praise excessive. 
On Monday morning there was what was called " reading over." 
The boys sat in the hall, grouped in their divisions. The Head- 
master in a silk gown stood up at a high desk, the three under- 
masters sat in a semicircle round him, also in gowns, and one 
division after another went and stood up in front of the desk 
while the report of the week's work was read out. When the 
fourth division went up, the news was read out that Duckworth 
and Baring had been guilty of a conspiracy, and had tried to 
get marks by unfair means. Duckworth was blamed even 
more severely than I was, being an older boy. 

We were told this would be mentioned in our report, and 
that if anything of the kind occurred again we would be 
flogged. When this was over, the boys turned on Duckworth 
and myself and asked us how we could have done such a base 
act. We were shunned like two cardsharpers, and it took us 
some time to recover our normal position. The half-term report 
was about nothing else, and my father was dreadfully upset. 
My mother came down to see me, and I told her the whole 
story, and I think she understood what had happened. I got 



74 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

through the rest of the term without any fresh dramas, and did 
well in trials at the end of the term. 

One day my sister Susan unwittingly caused me annoyance 
by writing to me and sealing the letter with her name, Susan. 
The boys saw the seal and called out, " He's got a sister called 
Susan ; he's got a sister called Susan." Sisters should be 
warned never to let their Christian names come to the know- 
ledge of their brother's schoolfellows. This kind of thing is 
typical of private-school life. The boys were childish and con- 
ventional, but they did not bully. It was the masters who 
every now and then made life a misery. In spite of everything, 
the boys were happy — in any case, they thought that was 
happiness, as they knew no better. 

In the afternoons we played Rugby football, an experience 
which was in my case exactly what Max Beerbohm describes it 
in one of his Essays : running about on the edge of a muddy 
field. The second division master pursued the players with 
exhortations and imprecations, and every now and then 
a good kicking was administered to the less successful and 
energetic players, which there were quite a number of. The 
three best Rugby football players were allowed to wear on Sun- 
days a light blue velvet cap with a silver Maltese cross on it, 
and a silver tassel. I am sorry to say that this cap was not 
always given to the best players. It was given to the boys the 
Headmaster liked best. What I enjoyed most were the readings 
out by the Headmaster, which happened on Sunday afternoons 
and sometimes on ordinary evenings. He read out several 
excellent books : The Moonstone, the Leavenworth Case, a lot of 
Pickwick, and, during my first term, Treasure Island. The little 
events, the rages for stamp collecting and swopping, stag-beetle 
races, aquariums, secret alphabets, chess tournaments, that 
make up the interests of a boy's everyday life outside his work 
and his play, delighted me. I was a born collector but a bad 
swopper, and made ludicrous bargains. I made great friends 
with a new boy called Ferguson, and taught him how to play 
Spankaboo. We never told anyone, and the secret was never 
discovered. We used to find food for the game in bound copies 
of the Illustrated London News. We had drawing lessons and 
music lessons, and I was delighted to find that my first school 
piece was a gigue by Corelli that I had heard my mother play 
at the concert at Stafford House, which I have already described. 



SCHOOL 75 

At the end of the term came the school concert, for which there 
were many rehearsals. I did not take any part in it, except 
in the chorus, who sang " Adeste Fideles " in Latin at the 
end of it. 

Some scenes were acted from the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 
the same scenes we had acted at Membland, but I took no 
part in them. Then came the unutterable joy of going home for 
the holidays, which were spent at Membland. When I arrived 
and had my first schoolroom tea I was rather rough with the 
toast, and Cherie said : " Est-ce la les manieres d' Ascot ? " At 
the end of the holidays I spent a few days in London, and 
was taken to the play, and enjoyed other dissipations which 
made me a day or two late in going back to school. The 
holiday task was Bulwer Lytton's Harold, which my mother 
read out to me. As soon as I arrived at school I was given 
the holiday-task paper and won the prize, a book called Half- 
hours in the Far South, which I have never read, but which I 
still possess and respect. 

During the Lent term we had athletic sports : long jump, 
high jump, hurdle, flat and obstacle races. I won a heat in a 
hurdle race and nearly got a place in the final, the only approach 
to an athletic achievement in the whole of my life. A curious 
drama happened during this term. A boy called Phillimore 
was the chief actor in it. He was in the first division. One day 
the Headmaster went up to London. During his absence a 
message was sent round in his name by one of the under- 
masters. The message was brought by one of the boys 
to the various divisions. It was to the effect that we were 
allowed or not allowed to do some specific thing. When the 
boy, who was new and inexperienced, brought the message into 
the first division, Phillimore said to him, " Ask Mr. So-and-so 
with my compliments whether the message is genuine." " Do 
you really want me to ask him ? " asked the boy. " Yes, of 
course," said Phillimore. The little boy went back to the 
master, who happened to be the severest of all the masters, 
and said : " Phillimore wants to know whether the message is 
genuine." As soon as the Headmaster returned the whole 
school was summoned, and the Headmaster in his black gown 
told us the dreadful story of Phillimore 's unheard-of act. 
Phillimore was had up in front of the whole school, and told 
to explain his conduct. He said it was a joke, and that he 



76 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

had never dreamt that the boy would deliver the message. 
The explanation was not accepted, and Phillimore was stripped 
of his first division privileges. The privileges of the first 
division were various : they were allowed to dig in a place 
called the wilderness, which was a sand-heap through which 
ran a light truck railway without an engine. They went on 
special expeditions. 

These expeditions need an explanation. Sometimes they 
consisted merely of walks to Bagshot or Virginia Water, and 
perhaps a picnic tea. Sometimes, as in the case of the first 
division expeditions or the choir expedition, they were far more 
elaborate, and consisted of a journey to London with sight- 
seeing, or to places as far off as Bath and the Isle of Wight. 

During my first term the choir went to Swindon to see the 
Great Western Works, to Reading to see the Biscuit Factory, 
and to Bath in one day, and we got home late in the night. 
During my second term we spent a day in London inspecting t 
the Tower, the Mint, and other sights, and had tea at the house ■, 
of one of the boys' parents, Colonel Broadwood, who lived in \ 
Eccleston Square. 

These expeditions were recorded in the school Gazette, ■,, 
and when my mother heard of our having had tea with Colonel 
Broadwood, she said : " Why should not the choir, next time they 
came to London, have luncheon at Charles Street ? " The idea 
made me shudder, although I said nothing. The idea of having 
one's school life suddenly brought into one's home life, to see 
the Headmaster sitting down to luncheon in one's home, seemed ( 
to me altogether intolerable. My mother thought I would per- 
haps be ashamed of the food for not being good enough, and said : , 
"If we had a very good luncheon." But that wasn't the , 
reason. It never happened. Anything more miserable than j 
the appearance of Broadwood when we had tea in his father's « 
house cannot be imagined. 

Nothing was more strange at this school than the sudden 
way in which either a treat or a punishment descended on the 
school. The treats, too, were of such a curious kind, and in- 
volved so much travelling. Sometimes the first division would 
be taken up en masse to a matinee. Sometimes they would be 
away for nearly twenty-four hours. The punishments were , 
equally unexpected and curious. One boy was suddenly , | 
flogged for cutting ojf a piece of his hair and keeping the piece 



SCHOOL 77 

in his drawer. In the second division the boys were punished 
by electricity. The division was made to join hands, and a 
strong electric shock was passed through it. This went on 
until one day one boy, smarting from an overcharge of electricity, 
took the battery and threw it at the master's head, inflicting a 
sharp wound. Nothing was said about this action, to the 
immense astonishment of the boys, who thought it jolly of 
him not to sneak. 

We lived in an atmosphere of complete uncertainty. We 
never knew if some quite harmless action would not be con- 
strued into a mortal offence. Any criticism, explicit or implicit, 
of the food was considered the greatest of crimes. The food 
was good, and the boys had nothing to complain of, nor did 
they, but they were sometimes punished for looking as if they 
didn't like the cottage pie. 

One day I heard a boy use the expression " mighty good." 
The next day I said at breakfast that the porridge was mighty 
good. The master overheard me and asked me what I said. I 
answered, " I said the porridge was very good." " No," said 
the master, " that is not exactly what you said." I then 
admitted to the use of the word mighty. This was thought 
to be ironical, and I was stopped talking at meals for a week. 

Another time a message was passed up to me to stop talking 
at luncheon. This was frequently done ; a message used to be 
passed up saying : "Baring and Bell stop talking," but some- 
times the boys used to be inattentive, and if one sat far up 
table the message had a way of getting lost on the way. This 
happened to me. I was stopped talking and the message 
never reached me, and I went on talking gaily. Afterwards 
the master sent for me and said, " You'll find yourself in 
Queer Street." I was not allowed to remonstrate. I didn't 
even know what I was accused of at the time, and I was 
stopped talking for a week. 

The Headmaster was a virulent politician and a fanatical 
Tory. On the 5th of November an effigy of Mr. Gladstone 
used to be burnt in the grounds, and there was a little note 
in the Gazette to say there were only seven Liberals in the 
school, the least of whom was myself. The Gazette went on to 
add that " needless to say, the school were supporters of the 
Church and the State." One day somebody rashly sent the 
Head a Liberal circular. He sent it back with some coppers 



78 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

inside, so that the recipient should have to pay eightpence on 
receipt of it, and the whole school was told of his action. One 
day there was a by-election going on hard-by. All the school 
were taken with blue ribbons on their jackets except the un- 
fortunate seven Liberals, who were told to stay at home and 
work. 

One year Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was burnt in effigy, as 
he was then a Radical, and the effigy held in its hands a 
large cardboard cow with three acres written on it. It was a 
bad time for the Liberals, as the foreign policy of the Liberal 
Government was at that time particularly weak, and it was 
impossible to defend Mr. Gladstone's Egyptian policy, still less 
Lord Granville. So the Head smiled in triumph over the 
renegades, one of whom I am glad to say was Basil Blackwood. 
He took the matter very calmly and drew offensive caricatures 
of the Conservative politicians. 

During the summer the rage the boys had for keeping 
caterpillars in breeding cages, for collecting butterflies, and 
keeping live stock was allowed full play. The Head himself had 
supplies of live animals brought to the school, among which 
were salamanders and Italian snakes. I myself invested in a 
green lizard, which although it had no tail, was in other respects 
satisfactory, and ate, so a letter of mine of that date says, a lot 
of worms. I also had a large, fat toad, which was blind in one 
eye, but for a toad, affectionate. But the ideal of the boys was 
to possess a Natterjack toad, whatever that may mean or be. 
We were allowed to go out on the heath during the summer 
and catch small lizards and butterflies, and altogether natural 
history was encouraged ; so was gardening. Boys who wished 
to do so might have a garden, and a prize was offered for the 
garden which was the prettiest and the best kept throughout 
the summer term. I won that prize. My garden contained 
four rose trees, several geraniums, some cherry pie, and a border 
of lobelias. It was a conventional garden, but there was a 
professional touch about it, and I tended it with infinite care. 
The prize was a ball of string in an apple made of Lebanon 
wood. Sometimes we were allowed into the strawberry beds, 
and could eat as many strawberries as we liked. During 
this term I made great friends with Broadwood. We were 
both in the third division, and decided that we would 
write a pantomime together some day. One day we were 



SCHOOL 79 

looking on at a cricket match which was being played against 
another school. I have told what happened in detail else- 
where in the form of a story, but the sad bare facts were these. 
The school was getting beaten, the day was hot, the match was 
long and tedious, and Broadwood and another boy called Bell 
and myself wandered away from the match ; two of us climbed 
up the wooden platform, which was used for letting off fireworks 
on the 5th of November. Bell remained below, and we threw 
horse-chestnuts at him, which he caught in his mouth. Pre- 
sently one of the masters advanced towards us, biting his 
knuckles, which he did when he was in a great rage, and 
glowered. He ordered us indoors, and gave us two hours' work 
to do in the third division schoolroom. We went in as happy 
as larks, and glad to be in the cool. But at tea we saw there 
was something seriously amiss. The rival eleven who had beaten 
us were present, but not a word was spoken. There was an 
atmosphere of impending doom over the school charged with 
the thunder of a coming row. After tea, when the guests had 
gone, the school was summoned into the hall, and the Head, 
gowned and frowning, addressed us, and accused the whole 
school in general, and Broadwood, Bell, and myself in par- 
ticular, of want of patriotism, bad manners, inattention, and 
vulgarity. He was disgusted, he said, with the behaviour of 
the school before strangers. We were especially guilty, but 
the whole school had shown want of attention, and gross 
callousness and indifference to the cricket match (which was 
all too true), and consequently had tarnished the honour of the 
school. There was to have been an expedition to the New 
Forest next week. That expedition would not come off ; in fact, 
it would never come off ; and the speech ended and the school 
trooped out in gloomy silence and broke up into furtive 
whispering groups. That night in my cubicle I said to 
Worthington that I thought Campbell minor, who had been 
scoring during the match, had certainly behaved well all 
day, and didn't he deserve to go to the New Forest ? "No," 
said Worthington ; " he whistled twice." " Oh," I said, "then 
of course he can't go." 

But the choir had an expedition that term, nevertheless. 
We went to Shanklin in the Isle of Wight, where we bathed in 
the sea and got back after midnight. 

My mother took my sister Elizabeth to the Ascot races 



8o THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

that year. Elizabeth was just out, and they came and fetched 
me and took me too, as boys were allowed to go to the races. A 
little later another drama happened, in which I was unwillingly 
to play the chief part. We were all playing on the heath one 
morning, and I had just found a lizard and was utterly absorbed 
in this find when I got a summons that I was wanted by 
the Head. I found the Head in the Masters' Common Room 
enjoying a little collation. It was half-past ten. " A telegram 
has come," said the Head, " that you have been especially in- 
vited to a children's garden-party at Marlborough House by the 
Princess of Wales, and you are to go up to London at once. 
Are you," said the Head ironically, " a special friend of the 
Princess of Wales ? " Half excited, half fearful, and not 
without forebodings, I changed into my best clothes, and ran 
off to catch the train. I was to come back that evening. I 
arrived in time for luncheon, and after luncheon went to the 
garden-party with Hugo, where we spent a riotous afternoon. 
There were performing dogs and many games. My father was 
not there. He was in Devonshire. When we got home it was 
found that I had missed the train I was supposed to go back by, 
and my mother thought I had better stay the night. She sent 
off a telegram to the Head, and asked if I might do so. I 
thought this was a rash act. The answer came back just before 
dinner that if I did not come back that night I was not to come 
back at all. Everyone was distraught. There was only one 
more train, which did not get to Ascot till half-past twelve. 

My mother was incensed with the Headmaster, and said if 
my father was there she knew he would not let me go back. I 
remained neutral in the general discussion and absolutely 
passive, while my fate hung in the balance, but I wanted to go 
back, on the whole. Both courses seemed quite appalling : to 
go back after such an adventure, or not to go, and face a new 
school. At first it was settled that on no account should I go, 
but finally it was settled that I should go. D. took me. We 
arrived late. There were no flys at the station and we had 
to walk to the school. We did not get there till half-past one in 
the morning. D. said she would sleep at the hotel, but the 
matron who opened the door for us insisted on giving her a bed- 
room. The next morning I got up at half-past six to practise 
the pianoforte, as usual, and D. looked into the room and said 
good-bye, and then I felt I had to begin to live down this appal- 



SCHOOL 81 

ling episode. But to my surprise it was not alluded to. The 
truth being, as I afterwards found out, that not only my father 
and mother, but Dr. Warre of Eton, had written to the Head- 
master to tell him he had behaved foolishly, and shortly after- 
wards, to make amends, I was sent up to London to the dentist. 
But oh, parents, dear parents, if you only knew what stress of 
mind such episodes involve, you would not insist on such 
favours, nor ever forward invitations of that kind, not even at 
the bidding of the King. 

D. paid me one other visit while I was at Ascot, and 
brought with her a large bunch of white grapes from Sheppy. 
We were not allowed hampers, nor were we allowed to eat any 
food brought by strangers or relations in the house, and when I 
saw that bunch of white grapes I was terrorstruck. I made 
D. hide it at once. I was afraid that even its transient presence 
in the house might be discovered, nor did I eat one grape. 

I cannot remember that summer holiday, unless it was that 
summer we went to Contrexeville for the second time, but 
when I went back to school in September, Hugo went with 
me and we shared the same room. Games of Spankaboo 
went on every night. During all my schooltime at Ascot 
I have already said that I was never once bullied by the 
boys, but I never seemed to do right either in the eyes of the 
Headmaster or of the Second Division master. The two 
other masters were friendly. These two masters, we were 
one day informed, intended to leave the school and set up a 
school of their own at Eastbourne. They were both of them 
friendly to Hugo and myself. The school was to subscribe and 
give them a bacon dish in Sheffield plate as a parting gift. One 
day I wrote home and suggested that Hugo and I should go to 
that school. I did not think this request would be taken 
seriously. It seemed to me quite fantastic — an impossible, wild 
fancy. To my intense surprise no answer explaining how im- 
possible such a thing was arrived, and I forget what happened 
next, but I know that soon the two departing masters dis- 
cussed the matter with me, and I found out they were actually 
in correspondence with my mother. The remaining masters used 
to scowl at us, but the term ended calmly and we left the day 
before the end of the term, so I was unable to play in the treble 
in a piece for three people at one pianoforte called " Marche 
Romaine," which I was down for on the concert programme, the 
6 



82 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

second time I missed performing at a concert in public, and the 
opportunity of a lifetime missed. When I got to Membland I 
found it was settled that we were not going back to Ascot, but 
to the new school, St. Vincent's, at Eastbourne. The Head- 
master was told, and he at first accepted the matter calmly, 
but a little later he wrote to my father and asked him what 
reasons he had for taking his sons away if other parents asked 
him. My father seldom wrote a letter of more than one page. 
But on that occasion he wrote a letter of four pages, and the 
Head wrote back to say that he was entirely satisfied with his 
reasons. My mother and I always wondered what was in that 
letter. My father when asked said: "I knew what the man 
wanted to know, and I told him," but we never knew what 
that was. 

In January Hugo and I went to Eastbourne, and my friend, 
Broadwood, also left Ascot and followed us. There were only 
nine boys at first. But the next term there were, I think, 
twenty, then thirty, and soon the school became almost as big 
as the Ascot school, where there were forty boys. 

Before I left Eastbourne, the Headmaster of my first school 
died, and I do not know what happened to the school after- 
wards. Several of the Ascot boys came to Eastbourne later, 
but the boys at Ascot were not allowed to correspond with us. 
My cousins, Rowland and Wyndham Baring, arrived, the sons 
of my Uncle Mina, who was afterwards Lord Cromer. 

At Eastbourne a new life began. There was more amuse- 
ment than work about it, and everything was different. We 
played Soccer with another school ; we went to the swimming 
bath, and I learnt to swim ; to a gymnasium, and we were drilled 
by a volunteer sergeant. Broadwood and I gave theatrical per- 
formances, one of which represented the Headmaster's menage 
at our first school. It must have been an amusing play to watch, 
as the point of it was that the Ascot Headmaster discovered his 
wife kissing her brother, another of the Ascot masters, the villain, 
and she sang a song composed by Broadwood and myself, of 
which the refrain was, " What would Herbert say, dear — what 
would Herbert say ? " Herbert being the Ascot Headmaster. 
Herbert then broke on to the scene and gave way to paroxysms 
of jealous rage. Another boy who came to this school was 
Pierre de Jaucourt, the son of Monsieur de Jaucourt, a great 
friend of my father's. Pierre was one of the playfellows of 



SCHOOL 83 

my childhood. He took part in the dramatic performances 
organised by Broadwood and myself in the Boot Room, which 
became more and more ambitious, and in one play the Devil 
appeared through a trap-door in a cloud of fire. 

Broadwood and I were constantly making up topical duets 
modelled on those of Harry Nichols and Herbert Campbell in 
the Drury Lane pantomime. But we were not satisfied with 
these scratch performances in the Boot Room, although we had 
a make-up box from Clarkson, and wigs, and we decided to 
act She Stoops to Conquer, which was at once put into rehearsal. 
I was cast for the part of Mr. Hardcastle, Hugo for that of 
Miss Hastings, Broadwood for that of Marlowe, Bell for that of 
Miss Hardcastle, and an overgrown boy called Pyke-Nott for 
the part of Tony Lumpkin. After a few rehearsals it was 
settled that the play should be done on a real stage, and that 
parents and others should be invited to witness the performance. 
Dresses were made for us in London, scenery was painted by 
Mr. Shelton, our drawing-master, and my father and mother 
came down to see the play. 

Hugo looked a vision of beauty as Miss Hastings. Pyke- 
Nott was annoyed because he was not allowed to sing a song 
about Fred Archer in the tavern scene, instead of the real song 
which is a part of the text. It was thought that a song of which 
the refrain was, " Archer, Archer up," would be an anachronism. 

The play went off very well, and Hugo played a breakdown 
on the banjo between the acts, but when he had played three 
bars the bridge of his banjo fell with a crash, and the solo came 
to an end. 

We kept up the custom of going expeditions, not long 
ones, but only to places like Pevensey and Hurstmonceux, 
which were quite close. We also went out riding with a riding- 
master on the Downs, and in the summer we sailed in sailing 
boats. Altogether it was an ideal school life. We found the 
work easy, and we all seemed to get quantities of prizes, but we 
learnt little. Hugo and I continued to play Spankaboo in our 
room, and Hugo would do anything in the world if I threatened 
to refuse to play. So much so, that one of the masters thought 
I was blackmailing him, and we were told to reveal our strange 
secret at once. This we both resolutely refused to do, pro- 
testing with tears that it was a private matter of no importance, 
and there the matter was allowed to rest, the master merely 



84 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

saying that if he ever saw any signs of anything subterranean 
going on we should be punished. 

I remember one curious episode happening. One of the 
masters found a letter addressed to one of the boys written to 
him by another boy. This was the text of the letter : " Dear 
Mister C, — May I have my sausage next Sunday at breakfast 
because I am very hungry." 

Mr. C, it was discovered, had been regularly levying a tribute 
from his neighbour at breakfast for some weeks, and the other 
boy, a much smaller boy, had had to go without his sausage. 
Mr. C. was severely flogged in front of the whole school. 
Boys who went to Scotland for the holidays were allowed to 
leave a day before the others, and as we had an all day's journey 
to Devonshire, we shared the same privilege ; so did Pierre de 
Jau court, who went to France. This inspired Broad wood to 
make the following lampoon, which was good-naturedly but 
insistently chanted by the rest of the school on the day before 
we went away : 

" The Honourables are going away to-morrow, 
And ten to one the Count goes too. 
We poor swinies we don't go, 
We poor swinies we don't go. 
The Honourables are going away to-morrow, 
And ten to one the Count goes too." 

When we went home for the holidays for the first time from 
Eastbourne the train stopped at Slough. The St. Vincent's 
term had ended a few days before the Ascot term, and there, 
on the platform of Slough Station, we saw the Headmaster 
of our Ascot school, surrounded by the first division and 
evidently enjoying a first division expedition. 

" Why don't you put your head out and say how do you 
do to them ? " said my mother, but Hugo and I almost hid 
under the seat, and we lay right back from the windows, spell- 
bound, till the train went on. 

Broadwood and I used to meet in the holidays in London. 
Broadwood used to say to his parents that he was having 
luncheon with me in Charles Street, and I used to say I was 
having luncheon with Broadwood in Eccleston Square, but 
what really happened was that we used to go to a bun shop, 
or have no luncheon at all, as neither of us would be seen at 
luncheon with a friend in each other's homes. 



SCHOOL 85 

Broadwood said that his mother cross-questioned him about 
our house, and that he gave a most fantastic account of our 
mode of life. 

While we were at school at Eastbourne many eventful 
things happened at home. In the summer holidays of 1886, 
Hugo and I went with my father to the Cowes Regatta. 

In September of the same year my father, Hugo, and myself 
went for a long cruise in the Waterwitch. We started from 
Membland and stopped at Falmouth, and Mounts Bay, and 
saw over St. Michael's Mount, and then we sailed to the Scilly 
Isles, where we spent a day in the wonderful garden of Tresco. 
At that time of year the sea in the Scilly Isles was as blue as the 
Mediterranean, especially when seen through the fuschia hedges 
and the almost tropical vegetation of the Tresco gardens. We 
then sailed across the Irish Channel to Bantry Bay and up the 
Kenmare River and drove in an Irish car right across the 
mountains to Killarney. 

Next j^ear was Jubilee year. Both my eldest sisters were 
married that year. Hugo and I attended these weddings and 
the Jubilee procession as well, which we saw from Bath House, 
Piccadilly, but I don't remember much about it, except the 
Queen's bonnet, which had diamonds in front of it, and the 
German Crown Prince in his white uniform, but I remember the 
aspect of London before and after the Jubilee, the Venetian 
masts, the flags, the crowds, the carriages, the atmosphere 
of festivity, and the jokes about the Jubilee. 

We went on acting a French play every year at Christmas, 
and it was before Margaret was married that we had our greatest 
success with a little one-act play by Dumas fils called Comme 
Elles sont Toutes, in which Margaret and Susan did the chief 
parts quite admirably, and in which I had a minor part. This 
was performed at Christmas 1886. After Elizabeth and 
Margaret were married, Susan and I and Hugo continued to 
act, and we did three plays in all : Les Reves de Marguerite 
(1887) ; La Souris (1888) ; V Amour de V Art (by Labiche) (1889). 

Another home excitement was the building of an organ 
in the house in Charles Street. It was by way of being a 
small organ at first, but it afterwards expanded into quite a 
respectable size, and had three manuals. This gave me a mania 
for everything to do with organs. I got to know every detail 
in the process of organ-building and every device, tubular- 



86 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

pneumatic, and otherwise. The organ we had at Membland 
had been built by Mr. Hele of Plymouth, and when we went 
back to Membland, when the organ was being built in London, 
my mother said : " Don't say anything to Mr. Hele about this, 
as he will be hurt at our not having employed him." One day 
Mr. Hele came to tune the organ, and I disappeared with him, 
as was my wont, right under the staircase into the very entrails 
of the organ and watched him at his work. While we were 
there in the darkness and the confined space, I confessed to him 
the secret that we were having an organ built in London. 
When we came out he went straight to my mother and said that 
Messrs. Hele would have been only too glad to build an organ 
in London. When my mother asked me how I could have told 
Mr. Hele we were having an organ built in London, I said I 
thought that as we were right inside the organ, in the dark 
and in such a narrow space, that it wouldn't matter, and that he 
would forget. When my mother told Cherie of this episode, 
Cherie laughed more than I ever saw her laugh, and I couldn't 
understand why ; I was, in fact, a little offended. 



CHAPTER VI 
ETON 

I ENJOYED Eton from the first moment I arrived. The 
surprise and the relief at finding one was treated like 
a grown-up person, that nobody minded if one had a 
sister called Susan or not, that all the ridiculous petty con- 
ventions of private-school life counted for nothing, were in- 
expressibly great. 

Directly I arrived I was taken up to my tutor in his study, 
which was full of delightful books. He took me to the matron, 
Miss Copeman, whom we called MeDame. I was then shown 
my room, a tiny room on the second floor in one of the houses 
opposite to the school-yard. As I sat in my room, boy after 
boy strolled in, and instead of asking one idiotic questions 
they carried on rational conversation. 

The next day I met Broadwood, who was at another house, 
and we walked up to Windsor in the afternoon. He told me 
all the things I had better know at once ; such as not to walk 
on the wrong side of the street when one went up town ; never 
to roll up an umbrella or to turn down the collar of one's great- 
coat ; how to talk to the masters and how to talk of them ; 
what shops to go to, and what were the sock-shops that no 
self-respecting boy went to. There were several such which I 
never entered the whole time I was at Eton, and yet I suppose 
they must have been patronised by someone. 

The day after that came the entrance examination, in 
which I did badly indeed, only taking Middle Fourth. My tutor 
said: " You have been taught nothing at all." I was in the 
twenty-seventh division — -the last division of the school but 
three, and up to Mr. Heygate. I was in the French division 
of M. Hua, who directly he put me on to read saw that I knew 
French, a fact which I had concealed during the whole time I 
was at my first private school. I messed with Milton and 

87 



88 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Herbert Scott, and after the first fortnight I became one of 
the two fags apportioned to Heywood-Lonsdale. 

The captain of the House was Charlie Wood, Lord Halifax's 
eldest son, and his younger brother, Francis, was a contemporary 
of mine and in the same house, but Francis, who was the most 
delightful of boys and the source and centre of endless fun, died 
at Eton in the Lent half of 1889. 

Fagging was a light operation. One had to make one's 
fagmaster tea, two pieces of toast, and sometimes boil some 
eggs, show that one's hands were clean, and that was all. Then 
one was free to cook buttered eggs or fry sausages for one's 
own tea. 

On my first Sunday at Eton I had breakfast with Arthur 
Ponsonby, who was at Cornish's, and I was invited to luncheon 
at Norman Tower, Windsor, where the Ponsonbys lived. There 
I found my Uncle Henry, my Aunt M'aimee, my cousins, Betty 
and Maggie and Johnny, and the Mildmay boys, who were also 
at Eton then. 

In the afternoon we went for a walk in the private grounds 
of the Home Park with Johnny, and he took us to a grotto called 
the Black Hole of Calcutta, which was supposed to represent 
the exact dimensions of that infamous prison. It had a small, 
thick, glazed glass window at the top of it. On the floor was a 
heap of stones. Johnny suggested our throwing stones at the 
window, and soon a spirited stone-throwing competition began. 
The window was already partly shattered when warning was 
given that someone was coming. W T e thought it might be 
the Queen, and we darted out of the grotto and ran for our 
lives. 

The whole of my Eton life was starred with these Sundays 
at the Norman Tower, which I looked forward to during the 
whole week. Maggie would take us sometimes into the Library 
and the State Rooms, and we used sometimes to hear the ap- 
proaching footsteps of some of the Royal Family, and race for 
our life through the empty rooms. 

One day we came upon the Empress Frederick, who was 
quietly enjoying the pictures by herself. 

Sometimes in the afternoon Betty would take me up to her 
room and read out books to me, but that was later. 

Our house played football with Evans', Radcliffe's, and 
Ainger's. We had to play four times a week, and though I was 



ETON 89 

always a useless football player, I thoroughly enjoyed these 
games, especially the changing afterwards (when we roasted 
chestnuts in the fire as we undressed), and the long teas. 
Milton, my mess-mate, was an enthusiastic, but not a skilful 
chemist, and one day he blew off his eyebrows while making 
an experiment. 

At the end of my first half we had a concert in the house, 
in which I took part in the chorus. I had organ lessons from 
Mr. Clapshaw, and during my first half I once had the treat of 
hearing Jimmy Joynes preach in Lower Chapel. He had been 
lower master for years, and had just left Eton ; he came down 
to pay a visit, and this was the last time he ever preached at 
Eton. His sermons were of the anecdotal type, full of quaint, 
pathetic, and dramatic stories of the triumph of innocence. 
They were greatly enjoyed by the boys. In the evening, after 
prayers, my tutor used to come round the boys' rooms and talk 
to every boy. He used to come into the room saying : " Qu'est- 
ce que c'est que ci que ca ? " My friends were Dunglass, Herbert 
Scott, Milton, Stewart, and Brackley. After Eton days I never 
saw Stewart again till 1914, when the war had just begun. I 
met him then in Paris. He was in the Intelligence. He had 
been imprisoned in Germany before the war, and he was killed 
one day while riding through the town of Braisne on the Aisne. 

Dunglass was peculiarly untidy in his clothes, and his hat 
was always brushed round the wrong way. My tutor used to 
say to him : " You're covered with garbage from head to foot," 
and sometimes to me : " If your friends and relations could see 
you now they would have a fit." 

In the evenings the Lower boys did their work in pupil room. 
Boys in fifth form, when they were slack, did the same as a 
punishment, and this was called penal servitude. While they 
prepared their lessons or did their verses, my tutor would be 
taking older boys in what was called private ; this in our case 
meant special lessons in Greek. One night these older boys 
were construing Xenophon, and a boy called Rashleigh could 
not translate the phrase, " Tovs 77-pos ^ Xe'yovTas." 1 My tutor 
repeated it over and over again, and then appealed to us Lower 
boys. I knew what it meant, but when I was asked I repeated 

1 1 have looked up the reference and miraculously found it. My 
memory after thirty-three years is correct. The phrase occurs in Xeno- 
phon's Anabasis, Book n. v, 27. 



90 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

exactly what Rashleigh had said, like one hypnotised, much to 
my tutor's annoyance. 

Sometimes when my tutor was really annoyed he would say : 
" Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think what 
a ghastly fool you are ? " Another time he said to a boy : 
" You've no more manners than a cow, and a bad cow, too." 
When the word SiW/«u occurred in Greek, my tutor made a 
great point of distinguishing the pronunciation of Swapi and 
Swdfjiei. Svvafiai he pronounced more broadly. When we 
read out the word Swa/xcu we made no such distinction, and he 
used to say, " Do you mean dunam$ or dunamai ? " It was our 
great delight to draw this expression from him, and whenever 
the word Swa/xai occurred we were careful to accent the last 
syllable as slightly as possible. It never failed. 

We did verses once a week. A little later most of these 
were done in the house by a boy called Malcolm, who had 
the talent for dictating verses, on any subject, while he was 
eating his breakfast, with the necessary number of mistakes 
and to the exact degree of badness needed for the 
standard of each boy, for if they were at all too good my tutor 
would write on them, " Who is the poet ? " In return for this 
I did the French for him and a number of other boys. Latin 
verses both then, and until I left Eton, were the most important 
event of the week's work. When one's verses had been done 
and signed by one's tutor one gave a gasp of relief. Sometimes 
he tore them up and one had to do them again. I was a 
bad writer of Latin verse. The kind of mistakes I made 
exasperated my tutor to madness, especially when I ventured 
on lyrics which he implored me once never to attempt again. 
In spite of the trouble verses gave one, even when they were 
partly done by someone else, one preferred doing them to a long 
passage of Latin prose, which was sometimes a possible alterna- 
tive. It is a strange fact, but none the less true, that boys can 
acquire a mechanical facility for doing Latin verse of a kind, 
with the help of a gradus, without knowing either what the 
English or the Latin is about. 

The subjects given for Latin verse, what we called sense for 
verses, were sometimes amusing. The favourite subject from 
the boys' point of view was Spring. It was a favourite subject 
among the masters, too. It afforded opportunities for innumer- 
able cliches, which were easy to find. One of the masters 



ETON 91 

giving out sense for verses used to say : " This week we will do 
verses " — and then, as if it were something unheard of — 
" on Spring. Take down some hints. The grass is green, 
sheep bleat, sound of water is heard in the distance — might 
perhaps get in desilientis aquce." 

The same master said one day, to a boy who had done some 
verses on Charles 11., " Castas et injelix is hardly an appropriate 
epithet for Charles 11." Once we had a lyric on a toad. " Avoid 
the gardener, a dangerous man," was one of the hints which I 
rendered : 

" Fas tibi sit bufo custodem fallere agelli." 

The whole of my first half was like Paradise, and I came back 
to Membland for the holidays quite radiant. 

When I went back for my second half I was in the Upper 
Fourth in the Lower Master's Division. The Lower Master was 
Austen Leigh and the boys called him the Flea. I started, ■ 
when I was up to him, the fiction that I could scarcely write, 
that the process was so difficult to me that a totally illegible 
script was all that could be expected from me. This was 
completely successful throughout the half, but in Trials I did 
well. I had started off by getting the holiday task prize, 
the holiday task being the Lord of the Isles, and as I had read a 
great part of it in the train going back, and as none of the other 
boys had read any of it, I got the prize. 

Those holidays Cherie took Susan and myself to Paris. We 
stayed at the Hotel Normandy in the Rue de l'Echelle, and I 
started from Eton the day before the result of Trials was de- 
clared. The day we arrived in Paris a blue telegram came 
telling us the result. It ran as follows : " Brinkman divinity 
prize, distinction in Trials, Trial Prize." This meant that for 
the distinction, one had a cross next to one's name in the school 
list for the rest of one's Eton career. The Trial prize meant 
one was first in Trials in the division. It was a complete 
triumph, and the Lower Master wrote in my report : " Had I 
known what I discovered at the end of the half that he could 
write perfectly well, I would have torn up every scrap of his 
work during the half." But it was an idle regret, as he did not 
discover it until too late. We spent the whole of the holidays 
in Paris and enjoyed it wildly. 

Looking at a letter which I wrote from Paris (March 1888) 



92 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

at this time, I see we did some strenuous sight -seeing. We 
went to Notre Dame des Victoires, to the Musee Grevin, to 
Sainte Genevieve, la Foire de Jambon, the Jardin d'Acclima- 
tation, and the Bois de Boulogne ; we breakfasted at the 
Cafe* de Paris, with anisette at the end of the meal ; went to 
hear " la Belle musique sacree " at the Chatelet, where Made- 
moiselle Kraus sang and Mounet Sully recited ; we visited 
the Pantheon, saw Victor Hugo's tomb, the Musee Cluny ; 
had breakfast at Foyod's, and saw the Archbishop of Paris 
officiate at Notre Dame, and went to the Louvre. All this was 
in Holy Week. 

The next week we went to Versailles, the Sainte Chapelle, 
and the Invalides ; saw Reichemberg and Samary act in the 
Le Monde ou Von s'ennuie at the Theatre francais and Michel 
Strogoff 2± the Chatelet. 

On Monday, 2nd April, I wrote home : " Nous allons jeter une 
plume et la suivre." We also saw a play of Georges Ohnet's at 
the Porte Saint Martin called La Grande Maniere and Le Prophete 
at the opera, with Jean de Reske singing the part of the false 
Messiah. We saw this from a little box high up in the fourth tier, 
and when we arrived we found a lady and a gentleman in our 
seats. We had expressly paid for the front seats. Cherie was 
indignant, and had it out with the gentleman, who gave way 
under protest. " Vous voyez," said the lady, " Monsieur vous 
cede sa place." " C'est ce qu'un Monsieur doit faire," said Cherie. 
" On rencontre des gens," said the lady, shrugging her shoulders. 

We did not go to see L 'Abbe Constantin, as Cherie said it 
was " une piece de car erne." 1 

On our last night in Paris we went to see a farce called 
Cocart et Bicoquet at the Renaissance. This play had been 
recommended to Cherie by a French friend of hers, who thought 
we did not understand French enough to follow dialogue. 
After the first act, Cherie became uneasy, and no sooner was 
the second act well under way than Cherie took us away. It 
was, she said to me, no play for Susan. She added that when- 
ever she had tried to distract Susan's attention from the more 
scabrous moments by saying, " Regarde cette manche," and 
by calling her attention to interesting details in the toilettes of 
the audience, I had recalled Susan's attention to the play by 
my only too well-timed laughter. 

The year after this, 1889, we again went to Paris — Cherie, 



ETON 93 

Susan, and myself — and this year Hugo came with us. Great 
preparations were being made for the Exhibition. It was not 
yet open, but the Eiffel Tower was finished, and we saw the 
reconstruction of the Le Vieux Paris and a representation of 
Latude escaping from the Bastille. 

We also saw Maitre Guerin performed at the Theatre 
frangais, with Got Worms, Baretta, and Pierson in the cast. 
Got's performance as the old, infinitely cunning, and scheming 
notaire, who is finally deserted by his hitherto submissive 
wife, was said to be the finest thing he ever did. 

We saw two melodramas — Robert Macaire and La Porteuse 
de Pain ; Zampa at the Opera Comique and Belle Maman, 
Sardou's comedy at the Gymnase ; and Cherie and I went to see 
Sarah Bernhardt in perhaps the worst play to which she ever 
lent her incomparable genius, and which, I imagine, she chose 
simply to give herself the opportunity of playing a quiet death 
scene. It was an adaptation of the English novel, As in a 
Looking-Glass. Bad or good, I enjoyed it, and wrote home a 
detailed criticism of the play. This is what I wrote : " The 
adaptation of the book is bad. They evidently think you are 
perfectly acquainted with the book, and the sharp outline and 
light and shade of character is not sufficiently marked. In the 
first act you see about a dozen people who come in and who 
don't let you know who they are, and who never appear again, 
and you do not arrive at the dramatic part till the last act. 

" The story is briefly thus : Lena is staying with Mrs. 
Broadway, very Sainte Nitouche ! everyone admiring her and 
all the octogenaires in love with her. She (whose passe is not 
sans tache) is under the power of a certain Jack Fortinbras, 
who forces her, under the penalty of unveiling her past, to 
marry a certain Lord Ramsey. Lena has in her possession a 
letter which Ramsey wrote to a Lady Dower, whose name is 
also Lena, and the letter is in very affectionate terms. Ramsey 
is engaged to Beatrice, and Lena shows this letter to Beatrice 
and says it was to her ! Of course, Beatrice thinks Ramsey 
un lache and leaves the house, saying her marriage is im- 
possible, and leaving a letter for Ramsey to that effect. Act II. 
is in Lena's house. Fortinbras comes and plays cards with a 
young man and cheats. Ramsey sees this, and Fortinbras 
is turned out of the house. 

" Act III., Monte Carlo. — Lena is staying there with Ramsey, 



94 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

with whom she is now desperately in love. Fortinbras appears 
and asks for money, which she gives. Ramsey comes in and 
asks why she is agitated. She says she is helpless, alone. He 
confesses his love for her, and she, in a nervous excitement, 
says, " Je t 'adore," and so scheming to marry for money, she 
finds she is dreadfully in love with him. 

" Act IV. — They are married and in Scotland. Fortinbras 
appears tracked by detectives and asks for 200,000 (pounds or 
francs ?) at once, or he tells of her passe. Then Sarah Bernhardt 
was superb. It was quite impossible for her to get the money, 
and she is so happy with her husband. At this crisis Ramsey 
comes in and half strangles Fortinbras, who, when let go, 
reveals all Lena's past. At the words, ' Cette femme m'aimait 
une fois,' Lena jette un cri d'angoisse, I would have given any- 
thing for you to have seen her act that scene. Ramsey hears 
it all, and, when given the proofs that are in letters, throws 
them into the fire, and Fortinbras is given to the detectives and 
Ramsey is alone with Lena and tells her that he really believes 
what the man said. She cannot deny it, and confesses the 
whole thing. Her acting was supreme, and Ramsey says to 
her, ' Et m'avez vous jamais aime ? ' Then she gives way and 
bursts into sanglots, and implores him to believe her, and that 
she adored him. He refuses to believe her and goes out. Then 
all is pantomime. She takes up a knife, throws it down, gets a 
little bottle of ' morphine,' drinks it, sits down with Ramsey's 
photograph in her hand ; then come seven minutes of silence. 
All pantomime, but what pantomime ; she quietly dies. I 
have never seen such a splendid bit of acting. It was lovely. 
As she is dying, Ramsey tries to come in, but the door is locked. 
He comes in at the window in an agony of grief and forgives 
her. Just when he is at the door she stretches out her hand 
and falls back epuisee. It was beautiful." 

I remember a doctor saying, as we went out of the theatre : 
" Mais ce n'est pas comme cela qu'on meurt de la morphine," 
— upon which someone else answered : " Alors, ceux qui ont dit : 
Voila une mort realiste ont dit une sottise. Pourtant elle a 
etedite." 

We went to the cemetery of the Pere Lachaise, and the tombs 
that I cited in a letter are those of Heloise and Abelard, Balzac, 
Alfred de Musset, Bizet, and Gericault. 

I went back to Eton for my first summer half, which is 



ETON 95 

said to be the most blissful moment of Eton life, and I 
think in my case it was. The first thing one had to do was 
to pass swimming. I had learnt to swim at Eastbourne, and I 
swam as well as I ever did before or afterwards, but to pass, 
one had to swim in a peculiar way. The passing was super- 
vised by my tutor, and I failed to pass twice, chiefly, I think, 
owing to the curious nature of my dive from the boat, which 
took the form of a high leap into the air and a descent on all- 
fours into the water. " Swim to the bank," said my tutor, 
much to my disappointment. The second time I failed again, 
but there was soon a third trial, and I passed. I at once hired 
an outrigged gig with another boy, and then a period of unmixed 
enjoyment began : rows up to Surley every afternoon and 
ginger-beer in the garden there, bathes in the evening at 
Cuckoo Weir, teas at Little Brown's, where one ordered new 
potatoes and asparagus, or cold salmon and cucumber, goose- 
berries and cream, raspberries and cream, and every fresh 
delicacy of the season in turn. Little Brown's, the school 
sock-shop next to Ingalton Drake's, the stationer's, which we 
still called Williams', was then controlled by Brown, who was 
a comfortable lady rather like the pictures of the Queen of 
Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. She was assisted by Phoebe, 
who kept order with great spirit, in a seething mass of unruly 
boys, all shouting at the top of their voices and clamouring to 
be served first. Brown's was open before early school, and if 
one had the energy, one got up in time to go and have a coffee 
and a bun there. It was well worth the effort, for the buns 
were slit open and filled with butter, and then, not toasted, but 
baked in the oven, and were crisp, hot, and delicious. Brown 
and Phoebe had the most marvellous memory for faces I 
have ever come across. They would remember a boy years 
afterwards, and when I was at Eton I used often to hear Brown 
say to Phoebe, as some very middle-aged man passed the 
window, " There's Mr. So-and-so." 

There was a pandemonium in the front of the shop ; in 
the little room at the back of the shop only swells went. 
There was another sock-shop called Rowland's, near Barnes 
Pool, which had a garden and an arbour, and sold scalloped 
prawns in winter and wonderful strawberry messes in the 
summer. Then farther up town there was Califano, who was 
celebrated for his fiery temper, and in Windsor there was 



9 6 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Leighton's. But Brown's was the smallest and cosiest of all 
the sock-shops, and nothing at any of the others could vie with 
her hot buns in the early morning. 

I was now in Remove, and once more under the tuition 
of Mr. Heygate. We no longer translated Greek stories and 
epigrams from the delightful collection called Sertum, which was 
used in the Fourth Form. This book is now out of print, but 
I fortunately possess a copy. It is a most delightful anthology 
of short anecdotes and poems. On the other hand, we did 
Sidgwick's Greek exercises, a book of very short English stories, 
which have to be translated into Greek. It is one of the most 
charming books ever written, and even now I can read it when 
I can't read anything else. 

I can't remember what we read in school that half, but I 
remember reading Monte Cristo out of school. My mother had 
given me an illustrated edition of it on my birthday. On the 
afternoon of a whole school day I was reading of Dantes' escape 
from the Chateau dTf, and I became oblivious of the passage 
of time. The school clock chimed the quarters, but I heeded 
them not. Just before the school hour was ended the boys' 
maid came in and told me I was missing school. I flung away 
my book and ran breathless to upper school, where I found the 
boys just going out. I had missed school, an unheard-of thing 
to do, which meant probably writing out endless exercises of 
Bradley's Latin prose. Each division had what was called a 
Prepostor, a boy who kept a book in which he was supposed 
to note all boys who were absent, and to find out if they were 
staying out, which meant staying out of lessons, that is to say, 
staying indoors on account of sickness, in which case the Dame 
of the house had to sign a statement to that effect in the pre- 
postor 's book, and add also whether they were excused lessons ; 
if they were not excused lessons they had to do written work in 
the house. On this day the prepostor had not noticed nty 
absence, nor had Mr. Heygate, and I joined the crowd of boys 
running downstairs as if I had been there all the time. 

There were two sorts of masters at Eton — those who could 
keep order and those who couldn't. With those who could, 
there was never any question of ragging. Boys knew at once 
what was impossible and accepted it. They also knew in a 
moment when it was possible, and they lost no minute of their 
opportunities, and at once began to harass the wretched master 



ETON 97 

with importunate, absurd, and impertinent questions, seeing how 
far they could go in veiled insolence without overstepping the 
line of danger. It was the masters who taught mathematics and 
French who had the worst time, with the exception of Monsieur 
Hua, who was an admirable teacher and stood no nonsense. 

In Remove we did science. There were three science 
masters — Mr. Porter, Mr. Drew, and Mr. Hale (Badger) . I was 
taught by them all in turn. Mr. Drew used to produce a 
mysterious and rather dirty-looking bit of stony metal or metallic 
stone, and say in a confidential whisper : " Do you know what 
that is ? It's quartz." Badger Hale had only one experiment. 
It was a split football which was made to revolve by turning 
a handle, and proved, but hardly to our satisfaction, the centri- 
fugal tendency of the earth. Mr. Porter's science lectures, on the 
other hand, were fraught with excitement. Apparatus after 
apparatus was brought in, and experiment after experiment was 
attempted, sometimes involving explosions. Sometimes they 
failed. Sometimes, just at the critical moment we would laugh. 
Mr. Porter would say : " I have been three days trying to get this 
experiment ready, and now you have spoilt it all." " Please, 
sir, we were not laughing," we would say. " You were looking 
as if you were laughing, and that disturbs me just as much," 
Mr. Porter would answer. It was no use accusing us of laughing, 
because we always denied it at once, and after a time he would 
always say : " Write out the verbs in mi for looking as if you were 
laughing." At the end of the half, Mr. Porter gave what was 
called a " Good Boys' Lecture," at which the first nine boys of 
all the various sets he taught attended, if their work had been 
satisfactory throughout the term. I went to three of these or 
more. They were lectures with coloured magic-lantern slides, 
showing views of places all over the world, from Indus to the 
Pole. Never have I enjoyed anything more. There was a 
slide of Vesuvius in eruption, and slides of Venice and New 
Zealand, which were entrancingly beautiful. But one half, the 
Good Boy Lecture was confined to Mr. Porter's holiday trip to 
the Isle of Skye, and the slides were not coloured. This lecture 
was a disappointment, and I am afraid, from the boys' point of 
view, a failure. Another remarkable lecture Mr. Porter gave was 
on soap-bubbles. Films of soap bubble were projected by some 
device on to a screen, so that you saw the prismatic colours 
enlarged and as vivid as rainbows. While this was going on, 
7 



98 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

a boy called Harben, who had a fruity alto voice, sang a senti- 
mental song into a tube ; the vibrations of the sound had a 
strange effect on the soap-bubble films, and made them change 
rapidly into a multitude of kaleidoscopic shapes and gyrations 
and symmetrical patterns. So Mr. Porter was the precursor of 
Skriabin's Symphony, in which the music is assisted by visible 
colour. 

Mr. Porter gave a series of lectures on electricity out of 
school. I and a boy in my house, Francis Egerton, applied 
to go to these. Mr. Porter somewhat reluctantly and sus- 
piciously allowed us to come. They were rather stiff and ad- 
vanced lectures, involving a good deal of formula writing on the 
blackboard with pi and other mysterious signs, but there were 
also experiments. We did not understand one word of it, 
but soon a difficult experiment was begun, which Mr. Porter 
said had taken him days to prepare. He was doubtful whether 
it would succeed. This was a rash remark. Egerton and I 
rocked with laughter. We laughed till we cried. There was 
no question of looking as if we were laughing. We were not 
allowed to go to any more lectures on electricity. There was an 
assistant masters' prize given for science, and it was either that 
or the following year that the subject was physiography. I went 
in for this prize, staying out the whole Sunday before so as to 
have time to read the book on which we were to be examined, 
a short book by Huxley. I competed and won the prize. When 
it came to choosing a book for my prize, I chose The Epic of 
Hades, by Lewis Morris. I had to go to Mr. Cornish, who was 
not yet Vice-Provost, to have my name written in it. He was 
disgusted with my choice, and he advised me to change the 
book. But I was obdurate. I had chosen the book for its nice 
smooth binding, and nothing would make me reconsider my 
decision. "It's poor stuff," said Mr. Cornish ; "it's like boys' 
Latin verses when they're very good." 

There were two other French masters besides M. Hua — M. 
Roublot and M. Banck. M. Banck was sublimely strict, but M. 
Roublot was easygoing, good-natured, but lacking in authority. 
During his lesson we used to read the newspapers and write 
our letters, but we liked him too much to rag. We used to bring 
in all our occupations for the week, and stacks of writing-paper. 
One day when this was happening, and every boy was pleasantly 
but busily engaged in some occupation of his own, who should 



ETON 99 

walk in but the Headmaster, Dr. Warre. The newspapers and 
the writing-paper and envelopes disappeared as by magic, and 
M. Roublot at once put on the safest boy to construe. Dr. 
Warre, who had grasped the situation, told us that our conduct 
was disgraceful. 

He often made sudden visits to divisions, and stood up by 
the master's desk while the work went on. These visits were 
always alarming, and one day, when he had just gone out of 
the room, one of the boys said: "Lord, how that man makes 
me sweat ! " But there was one other French master who was 
not French, but far more formidable than all the rest, and 
this was Mr. Frank Tarver. Mr. Tarver was a perfect French 
scholar, and when he explained what the word bock meant, 
and said : " When you go to a cafe in Paris you sit down and say, 
' Garcon, un bock,' " one felt that one had before one a perfect 
man of the world. But sometimes there were no bounds to his 
anger, especially if he found that one had not looked out words 
in the dictionary, or if one translated encore by again. One day 
I remember his being in such a passion that he took a drawer 
from his desk and flung it on the ground. It is a great thing to 
be able to do this effectually. The boys quaked. Most of us 
liked him very much all the same ; but to some he was a terror. 

Mathematical lessons were always a difficulty in my case. 
I should never have passed Trials in mathematics had it not been 
for Euclid, which counted together with arithmetic and algebra. 
Fortunately I could do Euclid without difficulty, so I always 
got enough marks in that subject to make up for getting none 
at all in the two other branches of the science. 

Every week we had a task called an extra-work to do out 
of school, which was meant to represent an hour's work of mathe- 
matics, and consisted of sums in arithmetic and algebra. It 
generally took me more than an hour, and I never managed to 
get a sum right. When we used to get into hopeless arrears 
with our work, and everything was in an inextricable tangle, 
there was always one solution, and that was to stay out ; but 
to be excused lessons one had to go to bed, and for that it was 
necessary to catch cold. But just an ordinary attack of Friday 
fever was enough to stay out. We complained of a bad head- 
ache and incipient insomnia, and Miss Copeman let us stay out 
at once, thinking it might be the beginning of measles, and we 
sat in her sitting-room reading a novel till the crisis was over. 



ioo THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

At the slightest sign of a real streaming cold my tutor used 
to pack us off to bed and keep us there till it was gone, and we 
were allowed bound volumes of the Illustrated London News 
from the boys' library, and my tutor would lend us books from 
his own library. 

Each boy in a division had to be prepostor for the division 
for a week at a time in turn. With the prepostor's book one 
marked in the boys who were absent, either from school or 
chapel. One had a list of the boys' names at the end of the 
book and ticked them off as they walked into chapel. This 
sounds a simple thing to do, but as the boys used to come in 
at the last minute and all together, and one had to take up the 
book to a master before chapel began, I found it flustering to a 
degree, and never knew if I had marked everyone in or not. I 
had to go to the Headmaster once for losing the prepostor's 
book, and he said I had played fast and loose with a position of 
grave responsibility, and gave me three exercises of Bradley's 
Prose to write out. 

After the summer half I was in Arthur Benson's division. 
We read passages from the Odyssey, Virgil, and Horace's Odes, 
the Second Book, and for the first time I enjoyed some Latin. 
I thought Horace's Odes delightful. Arthur Benson used to 
make us draw pictures illustrating episodes in Greek history, 
and he would stick them up on the wall if they were good. 
One of the subjects suggested was the bridge of boats that 
Xerxes threw across the sea, and I remember drawing a mag- 
nificent picture, with the hills of the Chersonese in the back- 
ground, copied from some illustrations of the Crimean War, and 
a realistic flat bridge made of planks placed on broad punts. 
He was delighted with the picture and put it up at once, and 
sometimes he used to take older boys to see it. 

There was not much religious instruction at Eton. We 
construed the Greek Testament on Monday mornings, but this 
was a Greek lesson like any other ; and Sunday was made 
hideous by an exercise called Sunday Questions, which had to 
be done on that day, and which we always put off doing to 
the last possible moment. These were questions on historical 
points in the Old Testament, and entailed finding out the 
answers from some such book as Maclear's Old Testament 
History, and writing four large sheets of MSS. The questions 
were sometimes puzzling, and we used to consult Miss Copeman, 



ETON 101 

and sometimes, as a last resort, my tutor, who used to say : 
" I can't think what Mr. Benson " — or whoever it might be 
— " can mean." I have still got a copy of Sunday Questions 
done at Eton. In this set we were told to give the probable 
dates showing the duration of the kingdoms of Israel and 
Judah, and what was going on in any other countries. Another 
question is : " Why was Pharaoh Necho against Judah ? How 
did he treat their successive kings ? " And the last question 
(there were several others) was : " Distinguish carefully between 
Jehoiakim and Jehoiakin." I seem to have answered these 
questions rather evasively, but I got seven marks out of ten. 

Besides this, boys got their religion from the sermons in 
Chapel, of which they were highly critical. They enjoyed a 
good preacher, and some of the masters and guests were good 
preachers, but the boys were merciless critics of a bad or ludi- 
crous preacher, and there were many of these. One of the 
masters preached symbolic sermons about the meaning of the 
Four Beasts. Another used to begin his sermons by saying : 
" The story of the Prodigal Son is too well known to repeat. 

We all know how " and then elaborately retell what was 

supposed to be too well known to tell at all. Before boys were 
confirmed they received special tuition on religious and moral 
topics from their tutor, but I missed it by having measles. So 
I was confirmed in the holidays, and just before my confirma- 
tion it struck my mother that I was singularly unprepared, so 
she sent me to see my Uncle Henry Ponsonby's brother, who 
was a clergyman. We called him Uncle Fred ; his sister had 
married one of my uncles. He had a great sense of humour, 
and was rather shy. He was also extremely High Church. 
When I arrived with a note from my mother, in which he was 
asked to examine me in theology, he was embarrassed, and he 
said : " Well, I will ask you your catechism, What is your 
name, N. or M. ? " And then he laughed and said, " I think 
that will do." When I told my mother this, she sent me to 
another clergyman who did talk, but confined the conversation 
to moral generalities, and said no word about the catechism. So 
J may say I had no religious instruction at school during all my 
school-time, for which I have always been profoundly grateful. 

Music lessons became a difficulty and a stumbling-block as 
time went on. I had organ lessons, and they were, of course, 
given out of school, and these lessons and the necessary practice 



102 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

took up a lot of one's spare time, besides having to give way to 
work. Mr. Joseph Barnby, the organist and the head of the 
music masters, said : " Your parents pay for your music 
lessons just as they pay for your Latin lessons, and so you 
ought to take just as much trouble about them." This was 
quite true, but the other masters did not see the matter in 
the same light. They couldn't be expected to take music 
lessons seriously, and said that music must in all cases always 
give way to work. 

The result was one scamped one's practice and shirked one's 
music lesson on every possible opportunity. Matters came to 
such a pitch that I was sent for by Mr. Barnby. The situation 
was aggravated because Dunglass and I had unwittingly offended 
the violin master, and had gone into his room while he was giving 
a lesson to another boy, and had then shut the door rather 
more violently than was necessary. Mr. Barnby was indignant. 
My brother John had been one of his best pupils. He said our 
conduct was scandalous. I had employed base subterfuges to 
shirk music lessons, and I and Dunglass had insulted dear kind 
Mr. Morsh. We apologised to Mr. Morsh, and things went 
more smoothly ; but I gave up the organ and had lessons on the 
pianoforte instead. Mr. Barnby was quite right, but he got no 
sympathy from the other masters, who continued to treat music 
as an utterly unimportant side issue which must give way to 
everything else. The result being, of course, that directly boys 
found that music lessons made it more difficult for them to get 
through their work, they gave up learning music. I have never 
stopped meeting people in after life who are naturally musical, 
and bitterly regretted not having been taught music seriously as 
boys ; and if parents were wise they would insist on music being 
taken seriously, if they pay for music lessons for their boys. 
But as yet parents have done no such thing. Besides music 
lessons, there was the musical society, which consisted of an 
orchestra and a chorus, and performed a cantata at the school 
concert at the end of the half. I belonged to this later, and we 
sang Parry's setting to Swinburne's Eton " Ode " at the Eton 
Tercentenary Concert in June 1891. Mr. Barnby used to con- 
duct, and had an amazing knack of discovering someone who was 
not singing, or singing a wrong note. The concerts were, I used 
to think, intensely enjoyable. There was an atmosphere of 
triumph about them when the swells used to walk in at the 



ETON 103 

beginning in evening clothes, and coloured scarves, which stood 
for various achievements either on the river, the cricket or the 
football field. As each hero walked in there were thunders of 
applause. Then a treble or an alto used to sing a song that 
reduced the audience to tears : " Lay my head on your shoulder, 
Daddy," or "The Better Land." There was a boy called 
Clarke, who used to sing year after year till his voice broke. He 
had a melting voice. During my last half at Eton there was a 
boy called Herz, who sang " Si vous n'avez rien a me dire," 
with startling dramatic effect, exactly like a French professional. 
But the best moment of all was when the Captain of the Boats 
sang the solo in the Eton Boating Song, whether he had got a 
voice or not, and then the whole school sang the " Carmen 
Etonense " at the end. What an audience it was ! How they 
yelled and roared when a song pleased them ! I used sometimes 
to go to St. George's Chapel at Windsor, and Sir Walter Parratt 
used to let me sit in the organ loft. I heard Bach's " Passion 
of Music of St. Matthew " in this way, and Sir Walter said : 
" You must be as still as a mouse." 

I have said there were two kinds of masters : those who 
were ragged and those who were not. The master who was 
most ragged was a mathematical master called Mr. Mozley. 
He punished, but could never stop the stream of impertinent 
comment that went on through the hours of his instruction. 
One day we got a boy called Studd to practise " God save the 
Queen " at his open window. His window looked out on to a 
yard, and Mr. Mozley's schoolroom was on the ground floor of 
the house next door to ours and looked out on to the same yard. 
The windows were open. It was a hot summer's afternoon, and 
the strains of " God save the Queen " came in through Mr. 
Mozley's window. Every time the tune began we stood up. 
" Sit down," cried the Mo, or Ikey Mo, as he was called. 
" National Anthem, sir," we said; " we must stand up." There 
was a short pause. Then the tune began again. Again we all 
stood up. Mr. Mozley rushed to the window, but there was no 
sign of any violinist. For ten minutes there was no interruption, 
and then, just when Mr. Mozley, by a shower of punishments, 
thought he had got the division in hand once more, the tune 
began again, and again we all stood up with plaintive, resigned 
faces, as though nobody minded the interruption more than 
we did. 



104 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Another master who was mercilessly ragged was Mr. Bouchier, 1 
who was deaf, and afterwards a famous Times correspondent 
at Sofia — a man who could do what he liked with the Bulgars, 
but who could not manage a division of Eton boys. The boys 
took mice into his schoolroom, and ultimately he had to go 
away. 

There were masters who were stimulating teachers and 
roused the interest of boys in topics outside the ordinary 
routine of work, and others who kept scrupulously to the routine. 
The latter were the fairest, for when outside topics were dis- 
cussed probably only a minority of the boys listened. It was 
above the heads of many. Arthur Benson kept scrupulously 
to the routine ; he made it as interesting as he could, but rarely 
diverged on to stray topics, and never on to such topics that would 
only interest a few of the boys. Edward Lyttelton did exactly 
the opposite. When I was in his division there were about half a 
dozen boys who were advanced, and had got shoved up into his 
division by a rapid rise. The others were solid, stolid dunces. 
Edward Lyttelton devoted his time to the intelligent, and spent 
much time in conversation on such topics as ritual in Church, the 
reign of Charlemagne, and the acting at the Comedie francaise. 
He carried on teaching by asking a quantity of questions which 
entailed a great deal of interesting comment and argument. In 
the meantime the dunces ragged. I was good at answering his 
questions, but I joined in the ragging, nevertheless, partly from 
a sense of loyalty to raggers in general. The result was that at 
the end of the half I was top of his division for the school-time, 
but I forfeited the prize owing, as he said in my report, to my 
incorrigible babyishness. My tutor thought this unfair, and 
gave me a book instead of the prize. Mr. Rawlins, who was 
afterwards Lower Master and then Vice-Provost, was a good 
teacher, but his chief hobby was grammar, and he talked far 
above our heads. I startled him one day. We were construing 
an Ode of Horace, where a phrase occurred mentioning the 
difficulty of removing her cubs from, I think, a Gsetulan lioness. 2 
He said, " There is a parallel to that in French poetry." I 

1 When he died at Sofia, he was canonized as a national hero, and his 
head now appears on some of the Bulgarian postage stamps. 
2 " Non vides, quanto moveas periclo, 
Pyrrhe, Gaetulae catulos leaense ? " 

Horace, Odes, Book in. Ode xx. 



ETON 



105 



said, "Yes," and quoted the lines from Hernani I had known for 

so long : 

" II vaudrait mieux aller au tigre meme 
Arracher ses petits qu'a moi celui que j'aime." 

He was dumbstruck. 

I was two years a lower boy, and reached the lower division 
of fifth form by September 1889. Hugo arrived at Eton, and we 
shared a room together. We messed together with Dunglass.. 
who had an order at Little Brown's of a shilling a day. Every 
day on the sideboard of the passage a large plate used to 
await us in a brown paper parcel containing eggs and bacon 
or sausages or fish. My tutor changed his house, and we 
exchanged the convenient house opposite the school-yard for a 
house that was once Marindin's, on the Etonwick road. It 
was far to go, and one had to get up early if one wished for 
coffee and a bun at Little Brown's before early school. 

Dunglass and I used to read a good many books. Rider 
Haggard and Edna Lyall were our favourite authors ; Stevenson 
got a second or third place ; but Jane Eyre and Ben Hur 
were approved of, and Monte Cristo got the first prize of all. 
After Rider Haggard and Edna Lyall, I had a passion for 
Marion Crawford's books and read every one I could get hold 
of. I have still got a list of the books I read in the year 1889, 
marked according to merit. It is as follows : 



Name of Author. 
Edna Lyall 



Shorthouse 



Rider Haggard 



Alpbonse Daudet 
Alexandre Dumas 



Name of Book. 
Donovan . 

We Two .... 
In the Golden Days . 
Won by Waiting 
Knight Errant . 
The Autobiography of a 

Slander 
Derrick Vaughan, Novelist . 
John Inglesant . 
The Countess Eve 
King Solomon's Mines 
She. . . . . 

Jess . . . . 

Allan Quartermain 
Mr. Meeson's Will . 
Mawaia's Revenge 
Tartarin de Tarascon 
Le Comte de Monte Cristo . 
La Dame de Monsoreau 



Remarks. 
Worth reading. 

Exciting. 
Very good. 
Worth reading. 

Very good. 

Worth reading. 

Excellent. 

Not worth reading. 

Excellent. 

Thrilling. 

Worth reading. 

Exciting. 

Trash. 

Trash. 

Very good. 

Perfect book. 

Worth reading. 



io6 



THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 



Name of Author.- 



NAME OF BOOK; 



Halevy . 
Octave Feuillet 

Lord Lytton . 
Marion Crawford 



L'AbbS Constantin 

Le Roman d'unjeune homme 
pauvre .... 

The Last Days of Pompeii . 

Mr. Isaacs 

Dr. Claudius 

Zoroaster 

A Roman Singer 

A Tale of a Lonely Parish . 

Saracinesca 

Paul Patoff 

Marzio's Crucifix 

Greifenstein 

With the Immortals . 

Sant' Ilario 

Two Years Ago 

Silas Marner . 

Adam Bede 

Romola .... 

The Mill on the Floss 

Katerfelto 

The White Rose 

The Gladiators . 

Ber Hur .... 

Necera .... 
Ward Robert Elsmere . 

The Woman in White 

That Frenchman 

Foul Play 

Treasure Island 

Kidnapped 

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . 

New Arabian Nights . 

The Dynamiter . 

The Master of Ballantrae . 

Mrs. Gainsborough's Dia- 
monds .... 
Charlotte Bronte . Jane Eyre 
Charles Kingslev . Westward Ho ! 



Charles Kingsley 
George Eliot 



Whyte-Melville 



Lew Wallace 

Graham 

Mrs. Humphry 

Wilkie Collins 

A. C. Gunter 

Charles Reade 

R. L. Stevenson 



Julian Hawthorne 



Remarks. 
Very good. 

Very good. 
Excellent. 
Worth reading. 



Very good. 
Worth reading. 
Exciting. 
Worth reading. 
Thrilling. 
Worth reading. 



Very good. 
Perfect book. 
Very good. 
Perfect book. 
Very good. 
Worth reading. 

Excellent. 
Worth reading. 

Very good. 
Thrilling. 
Worth reading. 
Perfect book. 
Excellent. 
Thrilling. 
Very good. 

Excellent 

Very good. 



The reason the last two have no comments was probably 
because the red ink in which the comments were made had run 
out. I remember being particularly thrilled by Jane Eyre, 
and so was Dunglass, who read it at the same time. 

The 4th of June was an excitement for boys who were just 
beginning their Eton career, but older boys were most blase 
about it and preferred short leave. We made great pre- 



ETON 107 

parations for my first 4th of June ; grease spots were ironed 
out of the tablecloth, everything that looked untidy was 
put away ; the window-box, which did duty for a garden, was 
prepared and decked. I struck out a bold note in my window- 
box by having a fountain in it, made by Mr. Dufheld of High 
Street, according to my instructions. There was a square 
tin basin and a fountain in the middle of it, which was fed from 
a tank which was hung high up by the side of the window. 
The fountain worked successfully, but made a great mess, 
and the boys' maid had no patience with it. When my tutor 
came round in the evening, the night before the 4th of June, 
he said the room looked like a whited sepulchre. I had visitors 
on the 4th of June. Cherie came, and I forget which other 
members of the family. 

Once every half the Headmaster used to ask Hugo and myself 
to breakfast. This we enjoyed ; it was an excellent breakfast, 
with lots of sausages. The Headmaster used to look at the 
Times, comment on the House of Commons, quote Horace, 
and ask after John and Cecil. Other masters asked one to 
breakfast as well, and I think few things gave the boys so much 
pleasure. They used to discuss every detail of the breakfast 
with the other boys afterwards, and retail everything the master 
had said. I enjoyed my breakfasts with Mr. Impey most ; 
he used to tell me about books, and we used to discuss Rider 
Haggard and Stevenson. I greatly preferred Rider Haggard, 
and I had just read King Solomon's Mines, and had one night 
sat up late reading She. 

Long leave and short leave were two great excitements. 
When I went for short leave I used to go by the earliest possible 
train and arrive at my sister Margaret's house long before 
breakfast. When long leave came about, we always went to a 
play on Saturday night, and I remember seeing Captain Swift 
at the Haymarket, and Coquelin in L'Etourdi. For my long 
leave of the summer of 1889, I had been looking forward for 
days to going to see Sarah Bernhardt in La Tosca, but when I 
came up to London, I found to my horror that Cherie and my 
mother had both been told it was too horrible a play to go 
and see. My eloquent advocacy overcame Cherie's scruples. 
" Vraiment," she said, " tu serais un superbe avocat." And she, 
Margaret, and I went off to the Lyceum and thoroughly enjoyed 
Sarah's harrowing and electric performance. While we were 



io8 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

having dinner, before starting, someone who was there said 
that two men who had been to see the play had come out in 
the middle. Cherie, who by that time had decided we were to 
go, said they must have been des poules mouillees. 

I think it was in 1890 that Queen Victoria opened the New 
Schools at Eton and made a speech. And one summer while 
I was at Eton, the German Emperor inspected the Eton Volun- 
teers. While he was doing this on horseback, a boy called 
Cunliffe let off his rifle and the German Emperor's horse bolted 
into the playing fields. 

Well-known people used to come and lecture at the literary 
society sometimes, but the only famous man I heard while I 
was at Eton was Mr. Gladstone, who lectured at the literary 
society in March 1891, on Artemis, as revealed in Homer. I 
was fortunate enough to get a ticket for this lecture. The boys, 
abstruse as the subject was, were spellbound. There was only 
one joke in the lecture, and that would have been better away. 
It was this : " Some of you may have heard the old story of 
the moon being made of green cheese." Pause for laughter 
and a dead silence. " The moon might just as well," continued 
Mr. Gladstone, " be made of green cheese for all the purposes 
she serves in Homer." 

At the end of the lecture the Provost returned thanks, and 
then Mr. Gladstone leapt to his feet and made an impassioned 
speech on classical education. The last sentence of his perora- 
tion was as follows : " But this, Mr. Provost, I venture to say, 
and say with confidence, and it is not a fancy of youth nor the 
whim of the moment, but the conviction forced upon me even 
more by the experience of life than by any reasoning quality, 
that if the purposes of education be to fit the human mind for 
the efficient performance of the greatest functions, the ancient 
culture, and, above all, the Greek culture, is by far the best and 
strongest, the most lasting, and the most elastic instrument 
that could possibly be applied to it." 

As he said these words his eyes flashed, he opened and raised 
his arms, and his body seemed to expand and grow tall. He 
seemed like the priest of culture speaking inspired words. His 
voice rolled out in a golden torrent, and as he said the words, 
" the best and strongest, the most lasting, the most elastic," 
they seemed to come to him with the certainty of happy inspira- 
tion and with the accent of the unpremeditated. With these 



ETON 



109 



words his voice reached its highest pitch of crescendo, and then, 
slightly dying down, melodiously sank into silence. 

This little speech showed me what great oratory could be. 

At the end of my first year there was a prize called the 
Headmaster's prize for French, for lower boys. I competed 
for this. It was always rather difficult to get a French prize 
at Eton, as there was usually a French or a Canadian boy who 
spoke and knew the language like a native. There was a 
special examination paper for this prize. I and a French boy, 
whose name I have forgotten, both got 95 marks out of 100. 
Then the papers were looked through again, and it was found 
that I had translated the French word hote by host, when it 
should have been guest, so the other boy was given the prize, 
but my tutor gave me a book as a consolation. The following 
year I competed for the Headmaster's French prize for boys 
in fifth form, and that time I won it, much to the delight of 
Cherie and of everyone at Membland. 

In fifth form we learnt German as an extra. German was 
taught by Mr. Ploetz, who knew the language ; and by other 
masters, who didn't. During the lessons of the latter, one paid 
no attention, and attended to one's private affairs. Mr. Ploetz 
was an excellent, stimulating teacher, but most unpopular with 
the other masters. The boys liked him ; he was a book coll ctor, 
and had a fine library. He taught me a great deal, not of 
German, as I paid no attention to the regular work, but I picked 
up from him a mass of miscellaneous information. It was the 
fashion to rag during his lessons, and I outdid everyone in 
ingenious interruption during Mr. Ploetz' lessons. It was not 
that he couldn't keep order. He was extremely strict and 
competent, but one knew, with the fiendish intuition of boys, 
that his complaints would not be taken seriously by the other 
masters, or by one's tutor. This was indeed the case. There 
were three forms of punishment at Eton. First of all, one 
could get a yellow ticket, which meant one had to do a punish- 
ment of some written kind and get the ticket signed by one's 
tutor. We did not much like leaving out the yellow ticket in a 
prominent place for my tutor to see when he came round in the 
evening. If matters went further, one was reported to the 
Headmaster and received a white ticket. The white ticket was 
in force for a week. During that week leave was stopped, 
and if the slightest complaint was made by anyone, it meant 



no THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

being complained of to the Headmaster a second time and a 
flogging by the Headmaster. I was complained of by Mr. 
Ploetz to the Headmaster. As I guessed, the other masters 
took this far from seriously. " What have you been doing to 
Mr. Ploetz ? " said my tutor. What I had been guilty of was 
overt rowdyism, combined with prolonged and unbearable 
impertinence, which if done to any other master would have 
been taken very seriously indeed. " What have you been 
doing to Mr. Ploetz ? " said another master to me, with a laugh, 
when he met me in the street. I received a white ticket, but 
I got through the week without further complaints, and I was 
never complained of again. 

When I was in fifth form, the school library became a 
favourite haunt of mine, and Mr. Burcher, the librarian, a special 
friend. Mr. Burcher was a little dapper man, who was pained 
when we jumped over the tables, a favourite game of mine, or 
if we threw the books about. "Is it a joke," he would ask 
plaintively, " or is it an insult ? " But in that library, during 
my last year at Eton, I made by myself the discovery of English 
poetry, and read the works of Shelley in the three little volumes 
of the second Moxon edition of 1850, and the poems of Keats in 
Lord Houghton's one- volume edition. On Sundays I used to go, 
rich with my new discoveries, to Norman Tower, and compare 
notes with Betty Ponsonby, who knew reams of English poetry 
by heart, and we would read each last new favourite poem. 
There is no joy in the world like this to discover these things 
for the first time. The shabby little Keats and Shelley, the 
green volumes of Tennyson, the three dark volumes of Matthew 
Arnold — what mines of fairy treasure they represented ! 

I made friends, through one of his pupils, with Arthur Ben- 
son. I had been in his division twice, but I had never known 
him well. One of the Coventrys, Willie Coventry, was his 
pupil, and he told Arthur Benson that I liked books and poetry, 
and had written a novel called Elvira, which was true (only it 
had to be destroyed after I had measles), and was going to write 
the libretto of an opera of which he, Coventry, was to write the 
music. He was not really musical, and did not know a note 
of music technically. He also intended, when I first made his 
acquaintance, to write a life of Mary Stuart ; but this, like the 
opera, never got far. 

Arthur Benson was most kind and interested, and it was 



ETON in 

arranged that on Sunday afternoons we should meet in his rooms 
and read out poetry. Arnold Ward, Mrs. Humphry Ward's 
son, who was in College, joined us. We read out poetry ; if 
we had written something ourselves, we left it with Arthur 
Benson for a week, he told us what he thought about it next 
time. I showed him a Fairies' Chorus from my libretto. He 
said : " I don't like those galloping metres, but I see you have 
got a good vocabulary." My next effort was an Ode on the 
Tercentenary of Eton College, in which Fielding was mentioned 
as "the great wielder of the painting pen." " Have you read 
Fielding ? " asked Arthur Benson. I had not read Fielding. 
*' 1 see," said Arthur Benson, " you take him on trust." 

There was at that time a newspaper edited by two of the 
boys, called the Mayfly. I sent them my poem on Eton College, 
but they wisely refused it. The Mayfly, edited by Ramsay, was 
an amusing paper, but not quite as good as the Parachute, 
which had come out the year before, and was edited by Carr 
Bosanquet and others. This was a singularly brilliant news- 
paper. It only had three numbers, but they were most success- 
ful. There was at the same time an exceedingly serious news- 
paper called The Eton Review, edited, I think, by Beauchamp, 
which had articles about the Baconian theory, and other rather 
heavy topics. During my last summer a newspaper which had 
twenty editors, but only one number, came out, called The 
Students' Humour. There was also a book published in 1891, 
called Keate's Lane Papers, in which there is an excellent poem 
by J. K. Stephen, which has never been republished, called 
" The Song of the Scug." It begins : 
" There was a little scug 
Who sat upon a rug, 
With a dull and empty brain, 

And would show his indecision 
In a twopenny division, 
With a friend of the same low strain. 
And would eat a lot of cherries and see a lot of cricket, 
Till his lips and his fingers were as sticky as the wicket, 
But at last he came to be a bald old man 
Who talked about as wildly as a bald man can. 
And he said, by Gad ; 
When I was a lad, 
And the ve^r best dry bob alive, 
I should have made a million, 
But a man in the Pavilion 
Was killed by my first hard drive." 



H2 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

J. K. Stephen used often to come down to Eton, dressed 
always in slippers, a dark blue flannel blazer, and a dirty pink 
cap on the back of his head ; and thus dressed, and reading a 
small book, I saw him serenely and unconsciously walk across 
the pitch during the Winchester match. 

Arthur Benson stimulated our reading tremendously, and 
we were startled and interested by his frank heresies. He 
said he did not care for Milton's Lycidas. He wished Shake- 
speare had been a modern and had written novels. He was in- 
different to Shelley. He loathed Byron, but was none the less 
impressed, when one Sunday Arnold Ward read out the de- 
scription of the battle of Talavera (Childe Harold, I. xxxviii.), 
and he admitted it was moving. He disliked Carlyle, Ruskin, 
and Thackeray. On the other hand, he introduced us to 
Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, Fitzgerald, and many others, and 
encouraged us to go on liking anything we did like. By this 
time I had read many novels — Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Pick- 
wick, a good deal of Scott (I was given the Waverley Novels 
for Christmas 1889), George Eliot's Adam Bede, The Mill on the 
Floss, and quantities of poetry. Betty Ponsonby gave me 
Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, but explained to me that 
the denunciations of God in it only applied to the Greek gods, 
and she and my Aunt M'aimee both changed the subject when I 
suggested reading Swinburne's Poems and Ballads. 

Willie Coventry and I found out that there was a competition 
going on at this time in a newspaper called Atalanta for who 
should write the best essay in 500 words. You were allowed 
to choose your own subject. Willie Coventry won it one month 
by writing an essay on Dr. Schliemann's Excavations, a subject 
suggested to him by Arthur Benson. The next month I com- 
peted, and chose as my subject a poem by Edgar Allan Poe 
called " For Annie," and I won the prize too. 

In the summer of 1890 I went to stay at the Coventrys' 
place at Croome Court in Worcestershire, and Willie Coventry 
came to Membland later in the same summer. The libretto I 
was writing for him never got further than a few lyrics, and his 
score never got further than a few bars and a triumphal march,, 
which I composed, and even played at one of Miss Copeman's 
afternoon parties. I can still play now, if pressed. 

I had a faint hope at one time that I might be able to get 
into the Boats. Arthur Benson had taken me out one day down 



ETON 113 

stream and advised me to try. I could row well enough on the 
stroke side, but not so well on the bow side of the boat. I put 
my name down for Novice Eights, in which boys were tried, and 
one evening I started out full of hope. Unfortunately I was told 
to row bow in the boat. A tall Colleger stood up in the stern of 
the boat to coach us. No sooner had we started than there was a 
loud call : " Keep time, Bow — keep time, Bow ! " and we had not 
gone much farther than the Brocas when I caught so violent a 
crab that the coach fell into the water, the boat was partially 
submerged, and we had to go back, some of us swimming. I was. 
never allowed to row in company again, and earned the reputation 
of being the only person who had ever swamped a Novice Eight. 

In the autumn of 1890 Hugo and I went up to London for 
long leave. My father and mother were staying at my sister 
Elizabeth's house in Grosvenor Place, and there we heard about 
the financial crisis in Baring Brothers, which had nearly ended 
in a great disaster. When we went back to Membland at 
Christmas everything was different. There was no Christmas 
party, and the household was going through a process of gradual 
dissolution. Cherie was leaving us, the stables were empty, and 
the old glory of Membland had gone for ever. 

All through the next year I was engrossed with the discoveries 
I was making in English literature. In the summer I sent a 
poem to Temple Bar, then edited by George Smith, and to my 
great surprise it was printed, and I received a cheque for a 
guinea. During that same summer I had a little book of poems 
privately printed at Eton, called Damozel Blanche, consisting 
of ballads and lyrics. 

I was now a member of the House Debating Society, in which 
we used to have heated discussions on such subjects as whether 
sports were brutalising or not, whether conscription was a good 
thing, whether General Booth's scheme was a sound one, and 
whether Mary Queen of Scots had been improperly beheaded. 

There was another debating society founded before I left 
Eton, called Le Cercle des Debats, in which we made speeches in 
French, and I remember M. Hua making ? passionate speech 
in favour of England relinquishing her hold upon Egypt. I 
spoke several times at this debating society, and in the report 
on the debate as to whether Monte Carlo should be allowed to 
exist, it is recorded that : " M. Baring croyait que c'etait un 
mauvais endroit mais que cela ne devrait pas etre supprime." 



H4 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

The summer of the Eton Tercentenary, 1891, was great fun, 
especially the concert, when Hubert Parry's beautiful setting 
to Swinburne's " Ode " was performed. I sang among the bari- 
tones. My mother came down for the concert, and Hubert 
Parry conducted himself. There was an interesting exhibition 
in the school hall, and it was there that I made the acquaintance 
of Mrs. Cornish. My Aunt M'aimee introduced me to her, and 
I soon became a great friend of the Cornish family, and was 
invited by them to go out on water-parties down stream to the 
Bells of Ousley and Runnymede, and to have supper with them 
afterwards. I enjoyed these water-parties as much as anything 
at Eton. 

In the summer holidays of 1891 I went to stay with Cherie, 
who had left us. She lived with her friend, Miss Charlesworth, 
in a little house called Waterlooville, near Cosham, in Hants, 
and realised the dream of her life, namely, to have a large garden 
of her own full of hollyhocks and sunflowers and sweet peas. 

In the Michaelmas half of 1891 I competed for the Prince 
Consort's French prize. I had already done so the last year, 
but I was then too young to compete with sixth-form boys, who 
were much older, and I was not expected to get a place, but 
I came out third. This year it was my great ambition to get 
the prize. I thought of nothing else. We had to read several 
books — Moliere's L'Avare, Alfred de Vigny's Cinq Mars, Taine's 
Voyage aux Pyrenees, Victor Hugo's Ruy Bias, and Brachet's 
Grammaire Historique. Besides this, we were examined in un- 
seen translations from and into French, and we had to write a 
French essay. We were examined by a Monsieur Hammonet. 
I worked extremely hard for this examination, and had extra 
lessons in the evenings from M. Hua. So did the other com- 
petitors. My serious rival was Grand d'Hauteville, who I think 
was a French Canadian, and who spoke French fluently. The 
examination took five days, and as it went on I became more 
and more convinced that I had not done well and could not 
possibly win the prize. When it was over, there was a long 
interval of agonising suspense before the result was made 
known. 

One afternoon I received a summons from my Uncle Henry 
Ponsonby to go and see him at Windsor. I found him, not at 
Norman Tower, but in a room somewhere in the Castle, and he 
told me that the Queen had just received the news of the result 



ETON 115 

of the Prince Consort's prize. She was the first to get this 
news ; the news was that I was first and had got the prize. I 
at once sent a telegram to my mother and to Cherie, and walked 
back to Eton, drunk with triumph and delight to tell my tutor. 

The news was not published for some days, and I told 
nobody, I think, except my tutor and Dunglass. But it came 
out at last, and was published in the Times and on the board at 
Eton. My father and mother came down to see me, and my 
father gave me his own watch : a Breguet, the Demidoff Breguet. 
It was then settled that I was not to go back to Eton, but to 
go to Germany to learn German and prepare for the Diplomatic 
Service competitive examination. 

Dunglass went on messing with Hugo and myself until I left 
Eton. We had three or four fags and they bored us, and we 
could never find things for them to do. Dunglass developed 
into a fine Eton football player, and got his House Colours and 
then his Field Colours. He was a new boy the same half as I 
was, and our alliance lasted unbroken through my Eton life. 
One half we learnt bird-stuffing together, and when our mess 
funds used to run short Dunglass used to say : "I've marked off 
an uncle," and one of his many uncles used to come down and 
tip us. Our mess was a lively one, and when there was a whole 
holiday on Friday, which necessitated Friday's work being 
done on Thursday, an arrangement which used to be called 
doing Friday's business, we used to sing in a loud chorus a song, 
the words of which were : 

" Why not to morrow ? 
Why not to-morrow ? 
Why, because to-morrow is to-day ! " 

The greatest excitements of Eton life were, I always thought, 
the House football matches for the House Cup. There was the 
Eton and Harrow match, of course, but while I was at Eton 
these matches were unexciting and Eton never won, and Dun- 
glass and I agreed that there were few things we enjoyed more 
than driving away from Lord's. Nothing surpassed the excite- 
ment of the House matches. One year, I think it was the 
year before I left, we were supposed to have a small chance of 
getting beyond first ties, but our House played so well together 
that they got into the ante-final. They then drew Cornish's, 
who had a strong side of powerfully built boys. An epic match 



n6 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

followed. Durnford's played as if inspired ; they got three 
rouges to nil, but failed to convert them into goals, and the 
game was almost over. Then, in the last five minutes of the 
game, Cornish's scored a rouge, and being far the heavier team 
converted it into a goal, and won the match. Never was there 
a more exciting match. 

During my last year my chief friends in the House, besides 
Dunglass, were Leslie Hamilton, who went into the Coldstream 
Guards and was killed in the war, and Crum ; and outside the 
House, Gerald Cornish. He, too, killed in the war. 

Arthur Benson was my greatest friend among the masters, 
and I used constantly to have tea with him, and have long talks 
about books and every other sort of thing. My last half I was 
up to Mr. Luxmoore, who was to be a lifelong friend. 

The last days of my last half were like a dream. I was 
hardly conscious of the reality of things, and I did not yet 
fully realise that my Eton life was coming to an end. There 
was no more work to do. The battle for the Prince Consort's 
prize had been fought and won. It was, as Eton triumphs go, 
a small triumph — small indeed compared with such glories as 
surround those who get the Newcastle, stroke the Eight, or play 
in the Field, or at Lord's in the Eleven ; but such as it was, it 
gave me as much joy and triumph as my being could hold, and 
nothing in after life could ever touch the rapture of the moment 
when I knew I had got it. 

Now there was nothing left to do but to make every moment 
seem as long as possible and to say good-bye. Good-bye to the 
School Library, my favourite haunt at Eton, the scene of so 
much hurried, scrambled work, of such minute consultations 
of ecclesiastical authorities for Sunday Questions, or of trans- 
lations of Virgil and Horace, and the Greeks ; of such long 
and serious discussions of future and present plans and literary 
topics, schemes and dreams, poems, plays, operas, novels, 
romances, with Willie Coventry and Gerald Cornish. Good- 
bye to the leather tables where numberless poems had been 
copied out on the grey Library foolscap paper, which for some 
reason we used to call electric-light paper ; tables over which 
we had leapt in wild steeplechases, while Burcher protested, 
where so many construes had been prepared, and so many 
punishments scribbled, and where the great poets of England 
had been surreptitiously discovered, and the accents of Milton 



ETON 117 

and Keats overheard for the first time, and the visions of 
Shelley and Coleridge discerned through the dust of the daily- 
work and above the din of chattering boys. Good-bye to the 
playing fields, to South Meadow, the Field, to Upper School, 
and to Williams' inner room, full of prizes and redolent with the 
smell of tree-calf and morocco, where I had so often dreamt of 
getting prizes and wondered what I should choose if I ever 
managed to get the Prince Consort's prize. Good-bye to the 
Brocas, to Upper Hope and Athens and Romney Weir, 

" Where the lock-stream gushes, 
Where the cygnet feeds," 

and to all the reaches of the river. Good-bye to Windsor and 
Norman Tower, and to the chimes of the inexorable school 
clock ; to my little room with its sock cupboard, bureau, and 
ottoman, to Little Brown's and to Phcebe, and then to one's 
friends : to my Dame and to my tutor, and to Arthur Benson, 
and the unforgettable readings and talks in his house. 

I went to Williams' to choose my prize, and while I was there 
Mr. Cornish strolled in, and seeing what I was doing, he said : 
" Of course you will choose a lot of little books — boys always 
do — but what you ought to do is to get Littre's Dictionary or 
all Sainte Beuve." This was asking too much in the way of 
sense, and I compromised. I chose a Shakespeare in twelve 
volumes, bound in tree calf, a Milton in three volumes, and a few 
other small books. My tutor gave me two volumes of Ruskin ; 
Mr. Luxmoore gave me a volume of Ruskin as well. Arthur 
Benson gave me Ionica. Just before leaving I had the honour 
of dining with my tutor, which made one feel already as if 
one was entering a new world. The hour struck when I was 
actually leaving Eton. Up to that last moment all had been 
excitement and fun, but when I was actually sitting in the 
train and crossing the fifteen arches railway bridge, and Windsor 
Castle and the trees of the Brocas came into sight, the whole of 
the past, the Eton past, surged up and overwhelmed me like a 
flood, and I realised in that last fleeting glimpse of the trees, 
the river, and the grey Castle all that Eton life had meant, and 
what it was that in leaving Eton I was saying good-bye to. 



CHAPTER VII 
GERMANY 

I SPENT the Christmas holidays, after leaving Eton, at 
Membland. I had had another little book of poems 
printed privately as a Christmas present for my mother, 
and I was still making discoveries in English literature, and 
of these the most important of all : Shakespeare and Milton's 
Paradise Lost. We travelled up in January to London, and it 
was settled that I was to go to Germany to learn German. My 
father heard of a family in Hanover where English boys were 
taken, but there was no room there. Someone then gave him 
the address of a Dr. Timme who lived at Hildesheim, near 
Hanover, and also took in Englishmen. It was settled that I 
was to go there. I started at the end of the month, and at 
Victoria Station I met Hubert Cornish, who was going to Dresden 
to learn German. We travelled together to Hanover via 
Flushing, and we were both of us seasick, and both swore that 
we would never cross the Channel again. We arrived at Hanover 
the next evening and stayed at Kasten's Hotel. The next 
morning we went on by the same train. I got out at Hildesheim, 
and Hubert Cornish went on to Dresden. Hubert Cornish had 
just left Eton, but he was older than I was, and I had only seen 
him in the distance, and at his father's house at picnics. W T e 
made great friends at once. Hildesheim was a charming little 
old town. One part of it was really old, and straight out of a 
fairy-tale, with houses with high gabled roofs, and mediaeval 
carvings on them, and there were many quaint and interest- 
ing churches, including the old cathedral with its ravishingly 
beautiful cloister behind it, and a rose-tree said to be a thousand 
years old. Dr. Timme had a small house in the Weissenburger- 
Strasse on the edge of the modern town. It was a two-storied, 
square, grey house with a flat roof, looking out on to the street 
on one side, and on to a garden at the back. I was received by 



GERMANY 119 

Frau Doktor Timme. Her husband was a master at the Real 
Gymnasium, and he was at school when I arrived. I could not 
speak a word of German. It was a curious sensation to live 
with a family and partake of their daily life and not to be able 
to understand a word they said ; to go out for walks and pre- 
tend to be joining in and following a conversation when one had 
not the remotest idea of the drift of it. I started lessons at once, 
and bought a small Heine, which I used to read to myself, and I 
soon understood that. It was bitterly cold. There was still 
snow on the ground. 

There were three children in the house : a dear little girl 
called Aenna, and a little boy called Kurt, and an older boy, 
about twelve, called Atho. Dr. Timme had two spinster sisters 
who lived in a house not far off with another old lady who was 
called Die Alte Tante, and Frau Timme had a brother who was 
called Onkel Adolf, and who had fought in the Franco-Prussian 
War, and her mother was alive. 

I found life interesting in spite of not understanding the 
language. In the early morning I used to go downstairs and 
have coffee and Apfelgelee. We had Mittagessen at one, and 
after that the household indulged in a Mittagschldfchen. At 
four in the afternoon we again drank coffee and ate Apfelgelee, 
and we had supper at half-past seven, at which there would 
generally be some delicacy like Bratkartoffel or Leberwurst or 
Herringsalat. Many English boys had been there before ; 
and Frau Timme told me that we English, as a rule, disliked 
German dishes. The first German phrase I remember under- 
standing was when Frau Timme announced to one of the aunts 
a surprising fact about me that I ate everything (" Er issi 
alles "). In the evening the aunts and other people used to 
visit us, and sometimes we would go to a concert. The Timmes 
were great friends with the family of Herr Musik-Direktor 
Nick, who was a musician, and all his family played ; they had 
entrancing musical evenings of trios and duets for violin, piano- 
forte, and viola. Herr Musik-Direktor Nick's nephew, Wunni- 
bald, gave me lessons on the pianoforte. I had German lessons 
with Dr. Timme. 

In the afternoon, I used to go for long walks with Dr. Timme 
and his brother-in-law, and we walked to the Galgenberg, to the 
Steinberg, and the Moritzberg, rather bleak hills of fir-trees, 
stopping as a rule at a small Wirtshaus, where we used to drink 



120 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

beer or coffee. In the house there was a small drawing-room 
downstairs, where the guest of honour always sat on the sofa. 
A smart drawing-room or the Gute Skibe, which was only opened 
on rare and state occasions. Frau Timme told me one day that 
she knew this room was a useless extravagance, but it gave her, 
she said, such great pleasure that she could not sacrifice it. 
Upstairs, Dr. Timme had a sitting-room, where I took my lessons 
with him, and I had a sitting-room where I did my work. After 
about a month I could understand what was being said, and in 
about two months' time I could make myself understood and 
carry on a conversation. I used sometimes to go to the theatre 
at Hanover, coming back by train afterwards. The first time 
I saw Schiller's W allenstein' s Tod I did not understand a word of 
it. One night I went to hear Tannhauser. Wagner was only 
a name to me, and meant something vaguely noisy. I had no 
idea he wrote about interesting or romantic subjects. I had no 
idea of what Tannhauser was about. I went expecting a tedious 
evening of dry and ultra-classical, unintelligible music. As 
soon as the orchestra began the overture, I was overwhelmed. I 
did not know that music was capable of so tremendous an effect. 
The Venusberg music and the " Pilgrims' Chorus " opened a new 
world, and I was so excited afterwards that I could not sleep a 
wink. I was stunned by these magnetic effects of sound. 
Curiously enough, I left it at that, and made no further effort to 
go and hear any more Wagner. I was almost afraid of repeating 
the experience for fear of being disappointed, and the next time 
I went to the opera it was to hear Verdi's Otello. 

I happened to mention casually that it was my birthday on 
27th April, and when I came down that morning I found in the 
drawing-room a beautiful cake or Apfeltorte with eighteen 
candles burning on it and a present from every member of the 
family. I could talk German quite fluently by this time. Frau 
Timme suggested that I should make the acquaintance of some 
of the boys at the schools. There were two large schools at 
Hildesheim, a Gymnasium, and a Real Gymnasium. The Real 
Gymnasium concentrated on the modern. The Gymnasium 
was more classical in its programme. For the purpose of getting 
to know the boys I was introduced to a grown-up boy called 
Braun, who was, I think, a native of Hildesheim. Most of the 
boys at both schools came from different parts of Germany and 
lived en pension in different families. The boys from both 



GERMANY 121 

schools used to meet in the evening before supper at a restaurant 
called Hasse, where a special room was kept for them. Braun 
was an earnest and extremely well-educated youth, a student of 
geology. Before I was taken to Hasse, he said I must be 
instructed in the rules of the Bierkomment, 1 that is to say, the 
rules for drinking beer in company, which were, as I found out 
afterwards, the basis of the social system. These rules were 
intricate, and when Braun explained them to me, which he did 
with the utmost thoroughness, the explanation taking nearly 
two hours, I did not know what it was all about. I did not 
know it had anything to do with drinking beer. I afterwards 
learned, by the evidence of my senses and by experience, the 
numerous and various points of this complicated ritual, but the 
first evening I was introduced to Hasse I was bewildered by 
finding a crowd of grown-up boys seated at a table ; each one 
introduced himself to me by standing to attention and saying 
his name (" Mein Name ist So-and-so "). After which they sat 
down and seemed to be engaged in a game of cross-purposes. 

The main principles which underlay this form of social 
intercourse were these. You first of all ordered a half-litre 
of beer, stating whether you wanted light or dark beer (dunkles 
or helles). It was given to you in a glass mug with a metal top. 
This mug had to remain closed whatever happened, otherwise 
the others put this mug on yours, and you had to pay for every 
mug which was piled on your own. Having received your 
beer, you must not drink it quietly by yourself, when you were 
thirsty ; but every single draught had to be taken with a 
purpose, and directed towards someone else, and accompanied 
by a formula. The formula was an opening, and called for 
the correct answer, which was either final and ended the matter, 
or which was of a kind to provoke a counter-move, in the form 
of a further formula, which, in its turn, necessitated a final 
answer. You were, in fact, engaged in toasting each other 
according to system. When you had a fresh mug, with foam 
on the top of it, that was called die Blume, and you had to 
choose someone who was in the same situation ; someone who 
had a Blume. You then said his name, not his real name but 
his beer name, which was generally a monosyllable like Pfiff 
(my beer name was Hash, pronounced Hush), and you said 

1 1 don't know the correct spelling of this word and it is not in the 
dictionary. 



122 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

to him : "Prosit Blume." His answer to this was : "Prosit,"' 
and you both drank. To pretend to drink and not drink was 
an infringement of the rules. If he had no beer at the time 
he would say so (" Ich habe keinen Stoff"), but would be careful 
to return you your Blume as soon as he received it, saying : 
" Ich komme die Blume nach " ("I drink back to you your 
Blume "). Then, perhaps, having disposed of the Blume, you 
singled out someone else, or someone perhaps singled you out, 
and said: "Ich komme Ihnen Etwas" ("I drink something to 
you "). When you got to know someone well, he suggested 
that you should drink Bruderschaft with him. This you did 
by entwining your arm under his arm, draining a whole glass, 
and then saying : " Prosit Bruder." After that you called each 
other " Du." Very well. After having said " Ich komme Ihnen " 
or " Ich komme Dir etwas," he, in the space of three beer minutes, 
which were equivalent to four ordinary minutes, was obliged 
to answer. He might either say: " Ich komme Dir nach" or 
" Ich komme nach " (" I drink back "). That settled that 
proceeding. Or he might prolong the interchange of toasts by 
saying : " Uebers Kreuz," in which case you had to wait a little 
and say : " Unters Kreuz," and every time the one said this, 
the other in drinking had to say : "Prosit." Then the person 
who had said " Uebers Kreuz " had the last word, and had 
to say: "Ich komme definitiv nach" ("I drink back to you 
finally "), and that ended the matter. If you had very little 
beer left in your mug you chose someone else who was in the 
same predicament, and said : "Prosit Rest." It was uncivil if you 
had a rest to choose someone who had plenty of beer left. If 
you wanted to honour someone or to pay him a compliment, you 
said " Speziell" after your toast, which meant the other person 
was not obliged to drink back. You could also say ; " Ich komme 
Dir einen halben " (" I drink you a half glass "), or even " einen 
Ganzen " (" a whole glass "). The other person could then double 
you by saying : " Prosit doppelt." In which case he drank back a 
whole glass to you and you then drank back a whole glass to him. 
Any infringement of these rules, or any levity in the 
manner the ritual was performed, was punished by your being 
told to " Einsteigen" 1 (or by the words, "In die Kanne"), 
which meant you had to go on drinking till the offended party 
said " Geschenkt." If you disobeyed this rule or did anything 
1 Or " Spinnen." 



GERMANY 123 

else equally grave, you were declared by whoever was in 
authority to be in B.V., which meant in a state of Beer ostracism. 
Nobody might then drink to you or talk to you. To emerge 
from this state of exile, you had to stand up, and someone 
else stood up and declared that " Der in einf acker B.V. sich 
befindender " (" The in-simple-beer-banishment -finding-himself 
so-and-so ") will now drink himself back into Bierehrlichkeit 
(beer-honourability) once again. He does it. At the words, 
" Er thut es," you set a glass to your lips and drank it all. 
The other man then said : " So-and-so ist wieder bierehrlich " 
(" So-and-so is once more beer honourable "). Any dispute on a 
point of ritual was settled by what was called a Bierjunge. An 
umpire was appointed, and three glasses of beer were brought. 
The umpire saw that the quantity in each of the glasses was 
exactly equal, pouring a little beer perhaps from one or the 
other into his own glass. A word was then chosen, for choice a 
long and difficult word. The umpire then said : " Stosst an," and 
on these words the rivals clinked glasses; he then said : "Setzt an," 
and they set the glasses to their lips. He then said : " Loss," 
and the rivals drained the glasses as fast as they could, and the 
man who finished first said: "Bierjunge," or whatever word 
had been chosen. The umpire then declared the winner. All 
these proceedings, as can be imagined, would be a little difficult 
to understand if one didn't know that they involved drinking 
beer. Such had been my plight when the ritual was explained 
to me by Mr. Braun. I found the first evening extremely 
bewildering, but I soon became an expert in the ritual, and 
took much pleasure in raising difficult points. 

These gatherings used to happen every evening. If you 
wished to celebrate a special occasion you ordered what was 
called a Tunnemann, which was a huge glass as big as a small 
barrel which was circulated round the table, everyone drinking 
in turn as out of a loving-cup. A record was kept of these 
ceremonies in a book. The boys who attended these gatherings 
were mostly eighteen or nineteen years old, and belonged to the 
first two classes of the school, the Prima and the Secunda. 
They belonged to a Turnverein, a gymnastic association, and 
were divided into two classes — the juniors who were called 
Fiichse and the seniors who were not. The Fuchse had to 
obey the others. 

Another thing which I found more difficult than the Bier- 



124 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

komment was a card game which Dr. Timme tried to teach me. 
It was the game of Skat, and was played by three people, one 
against two, with a possible fourth person cutting in, but only 
by three at a time. When Dr. Timme first explained it to me I 
understood German imperfectly, and I could not make head 
or tail of the game. This disgusted Dr. Timme, who said : 
'" Herr Baring hat kein Inter esse dafiir." But at the end of 
five years, after repeated visits to Germany, and with the help 
of an English book on the subject, I ended by mastering the 
principles of the game. I think it is the best game of cards 
ever invented, and by far the most difficult. I will not attempt 
to explain it, but it is a mixture of " Solo-whist," " Prefer- 
ence," and " Misery," with a dash of " Picquet " in it. Every- 
body plays for his own hand and you have no partner ; so you 
are responsible to yourself alone. I did not learn the game 
until several years later. 

In the meantime, Hubert Cornish had left Dresden and was 
established at Professor Ihne's at the Villa Felseck, Heidelberg. 
Professor Ihne, who knew my cousins, invited me to go there. I 
set out, and after travelling all day I arrived at one in the morn- 
ing and found not only Hubert but an American called Mr. Haz- 
litt Alva Cuppy, who was studying German, and who had come 
to the station in case I should want help with my luggage. The 
next morning I woke up and went to the window, and beheld one 
of the most beautiful sights it is possible to see : Heidelberg 
Castle and the hills of the Neckar in spring. It was the beginning 
of May. It was fine and hot ; the trees had just put on their 
most brilliant green ; the lilac and laburnum were out. The 
fields, yellow with buttercups and scarlet with poppies, were 
like impressionist pictures of the newest school. After the slow 
spring and the bleak fir-tree-clad country of the north it was 
like coming suddenly into another world. At breakfast I was 
introduced to Professor Ihne, a large, comfortable Professor 
with white hair and spectacles. I had met him once before at 
the Norman Tower. The two other inmates of the house besides 
Hubert were Mr. Hazlitt Alva Cuppy and Mr. Otto Kuhn, an 
Austrian ; both of them were attending the lectures of the 
University. The Villa Felseck was half-way up a hill covered 
with vines, and Professor Ihne made his own wine. In the 
garden there was a pergola under which we worked outdoors 
at a table. Then a most blissful epoch began. In the morning 



GERMANY 125 

we went to lectures in the University and strolled about the 
town, and in the afternoons we went for walks in the woods or 
for expeditions on the river. 

Heidelberg was full of students, and our ambition was to get 
to know some of them, but we did not know how to set about 
doing this. We were too shy to take any steps, and every day 
we settled we would take a step, but the day passed, and nothing 
had been done. We confided our hesitations to a lady — a kind, 
motherly lady who kept a Wirtshaus, and she said that the 
matter was simple. What she did I do not know, but that 
very day we received a visit from the representatives of a 
Burschenschaft called the Franconia, who asked us to visit their 
clubhouse with a view to our being received as guests. We 
went there the next morning, and the conditions under which 
we could be either Konkneipante or Kneipgdste of the Germania 
were read out to us. 

A Konkneipant was a kind of unofficial member, a Kneipgast 
was simply a guest with certain obligations. The former, 
the Konkneipant, seemed to be liable to many alarming 
possibilities and conditions, and he had to be prepared to 
fight duels, even if he did not do so, so we chose the latter 
status, and were enrolled as Kneipgdste. 

We attended a Kneipe that night, I think. All the rules 
of the Bier-komment, which I have already described, obtained. 
You sat at a table, and endless mugs of beer were brought 
in, and toasts were drunk, according to ritual, but the 
evening was enlivened by the singing of songs in chorus. Some- 
one accompanied the songs, everyone had a song-book, and the 
entertainment led off with Goethe's song, " Ergo Bibamus " ; 
after that a song was sung about every quarter of an hour : 
"Der Mai ist gekommen," "Es hatten drei Gesellen ein fein 
Collegium," or "Es zogen drei Burschen wohl uber den 
Rhein." 

The entertainment went on till about one in the morning. 
There was an official Kneipe three nights a week (offiziell), and 
an unofficial Kneipe (offizieuse) on the other nights. Besides 
this, the members of the Burschenschaft met in the morning for 
Friihschoppen in the castle gardens, or elsewhere, and in the 
afternoon went expeditions together. In the morning they had 
fencing lessons. They never went to lectures. When they 
wanted to work they went for a term to another university, 



126 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

and did nothing but work there. One morning Hubert and I 
attended a lecture on Philosophie, that is to say, history, and 
curiously enough the lecture was about England. The lecturer 
went through the gifts which different nations had bequeathed 
to the world as a legacy ; how Greece had given the arts to the 
world, and the Romans had given it law ; England's gift to the 
world, he said, was Freedom, and as he said the word Freiheit, 
his voice rang, and we felt all of a tremble. 

The country round Heidelberg was at this time of year at its 
most glorious. The fields were sheets of the brightest yellow. 
At night choruses of nightingales sang ; the air was heavy with 
the smell of the lilacs. Sometimes we would go up the river 
and to the little town of Neckarsteinar, which is like a toy city 
on the top of a green hill, with a wall round it, and is exactly 
what I imagined the " green hill far away " to be when I was a 
child, except that it had a wall. One evening — but this was 
later in the summer when I went back a second time to 
Heidelberg — we had a Kneipe in Dr. Ihne's garden and invited 
the Germania Burschenschaft. Professor Ihne came and made a 
speech and then left us ; songs were sung, and I made a speech 
in German, and we sang : " Alt Heidelberg du Feine." 

Besides all these events, Hubert and I spent a good deal of 
time reading and discussing theories of life. We were intoxicated 
by Swinburne, spellbound by Kipling, and great devotees of 
Meredith and Hardy. We also read a certain amount of German, 
and I remember reading Lewes' Life of Goethe. I had already 
read a certain amount of Goethe and Schiller with Dr. Timme, 
including Hermann und Dorothea, Iphegenie auf Tauris, and 
Tasso. Faust and the lyrics I had read by myself as soon as I 
could spell out the letters. Professor Ihne used to discuss books 
with us. He admired Byron enormously. He had no patience 
with the German infatuation for Tennyson, especially for 
" Enoch Arden," which he thought a childish poem. Byron, 
he used to say, was a giant ; Tennyson a dwarf. Shelley, he 
admitted, had written a fine philosophical poem : " Prometheus 
Unbound," and Swinburne could schone Versen machen. He 
could not abide the German cult for Shakespeare. It was not 
that he did not admire Shakespeare as a dramatist and a poet, 
but the German searching for meanings in the plays, and the 
philosophical theories deduced from them and spun round his 
work, made him impatient. This was a sound point of view, for 



GERMANY 127 

he approached Shakespeare in much the same spirit as Dryden 
.and Dr. Johnson did. Hamlet annoyed him. Why, he used 
to ask, did Hamlet presume to think he was born to set the 
world aright ? Nobody had asked him to do so. Othello, he 
said, was stupid : ein dummer Kerl. The tragedies hurt him 
too much. He preferred Schiller. 

He had no great love for Milton's Paradise Lost either ; 
he thought there was a lot of tautology in the English language. 
He said the phrase, "Assemble and meet together," in the 
Prayer Book was an instance of this. He said the modern 
English writers used unnecessarily long Latin words. He had 
actually seen the word to pullulate in a Times leading article. 
Swarm would have meant the same thing and been a thousand 
times better. He was broad-minded in politics and the contrary 
of a Chauvinist. He had a hearty dislike of Bismarck. There 
was something refreshingly Johnsonian about him, and when 
Mr. Cuppy read him the thesis which he destined to show up 
to the Heidelberg examiners for his degree, Professor Ihne 
repeated the first sentence, which ran thus : " Ever since my 
earliest years I determined to be a great man," and said : 
" Pooh, pooh, you can't say that here." " But it's true," said 
Mr. Cuppy. 

Mr. Cuppy was a charming character. He had been in about 
twenty-five professions before arriving at Heidelberg, and he 
had been in a circus troop, a stoker in the railway, a clerk, a 
journalist, a farmer, and I don't know how many other things, 
and he was now working hard for his degree. He was the 
kindest man I have ever met, and there was no trouble he would 
not take to do one a service, and there was no atom of selfishness 
in his composition. 

The students took us to the Mensur to see the duels. The 
students fought with sharp rapiers, as sharp as a razor on 
one side, which they held high over their heads, all the fighting 
being done by the strength of the wrist ; you could only, from 
the position that the rapier was held, wound your adversary on 
the top of his head or on the side of his cheek, but lest your 
rapier should go astray, and wound some other vital part the 
duellists wore a padded jacket, and a protection for the neck. 
The wounds on the top of the head were formidable, and 
directly after a fight they were sewn up. The Mensur reeked 
with iodoform. After the entertainment was over Maibohle was 



128 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

drunk, a delicious sort of cup in which wild strawberries floated. 
Hubert used to have fencing lessons and found the exercise 
difficult. 

The time came when I had to go back to Hildesheim. 

Shortly after I arrived there the Timmes invited Hubert Cornish 

to come and stay with them, and he stayed with us for about ten 

days. During his visit we went for a short walking tour in the 

Harz Mountains and climbed up the Brocken, a disappointing 

mountain, as, so far from meeting Mephistopheles and the 

witches, you walk up a broad and intensely civilised and tidy 

road, with a plentiful array of notice-boards, till you get to the 

top, where it is uncomfortably cold. After he left us, it was 

settled, at my earnest request, that I should go to the school, the 

Real Gymnasium, and take part in some of the lessons. I was 

to be an Oberprimaner : in the first class, that is to say ; and to 

attend not all the lessons, but the English, German, and History^ 

classes. Before entering upon this school career, Frau Doktor 

Timme told me that I must make an official visit to all the 

masters with gloves. So I bought a pair of shiny glace gloves 

and paid an official visit to the Headmaster and the various 

undermasters. The first class I attended was a mathematical 

lesson, given by the Headmaster. I sat next to a boy called 

Schwerin, whom I met years later as the director of one of the 

Berlin theatres. I was not meant to go to this lesson, and I 

went there by accident, but the Headmaster told me I might 

stay and listen to it if I liked. It was so far above my head 

that I did not even know what it was about. At the English 

lesson I was more at home, and I was asked to give the English 

dictation. I did this, but the boys at once complained, as I did 

not read out the English with the German pronunciation, which 

they were accustomed to, and they could not understand me. 

The master said they were quite right, and that it was plain I 

did not know how to pronounce English. The lessons in German 

literature and in history were interesting. Every week the 

boys had to write a German essay on the topic that was being 

discussed, or rather on the book that was being read and 

diagnosed. This essay was the main feature of the week's work,. 

just as Latin verses were at Eton. The writing of this essay 

took an enormous amount of time and trouble. I only wrote 

one, on Schiller's Braut von Messina. It had to be neatly 

copied out, on paper folded in a special way, and the subject 



GERMANY 



129 



had to be divided into sections. The history master was fond 
of drawing parallels between ancient and modern history, and 
when he discussed the Punic wars, he laid stress on the fact 
that sea power had been beaten by land power. That was, 
he said, the universal lesson of history, and let England lay 
this matter to heart. The Napoleonic Wars seemed to have 
escaped him. 

After I had been at Hildesheim a little time, Frau Timme 
told me one day that perhaps I was unaware how greatly 
Englishmen were disliked in Germany. This was a complete 
surprise to me, as I had always thought the relations between 
the two countries were supposed to be good, and that in a kind of 
way the Germans were supposed to be our cousins. " No," said 
Frau Timme ; " there is a real prejudice against English people," 
and Timme added : "There had always been ein gewisser Neid," 
a certain envy of the English. They knew, they said, that 
individual Englishmen were often admirable, but politically 
and collectively the English were disliked. One grievance 
was we supplied, they said, the French with coal during 
the Franco-Prussian War : another, the behaviour of the 
Empress Frederick, who was accused of redecorating 
Frederick the Great's rooms at Potsdam. I found after- 
wards the Empress Frederick's doings were a universal 
topic, wherever I went in Germany. Frau Timme's brother, 
Onkel Adolph, deplored the relations between Great Britain 
and Germany, which he said could not well be worse, 
although looking back on that time they were supposed then, 
I think, to be good. The Timmes were Hanoverians, and 
used still to reckon in Thalers and speak of the Prussians with 
dislike ; in spite of this they were whole-hearted admirers of 
Bismarck. I enjoyed my little bit of school life at Hildesheim 
immensely. I used to get up at half-past six, walk to school 
and be there by seven, wear a red cap, take part in the few 
classes I attended, and then come back for luncheon. In the 
afternoon, I used to go for walks or bathe in the little river 
which ran through Hildesheim, called the Innerste. In the 
evenings before supper we met at Hasse's, and sometimes we 
used to walk to a distant village and hold a Kneipe, after 
which the boys used to dance to the strains of Donauwellen. 
It was difficult to believe that one had ever lived any other 
kind of life. 



130 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Domestic life in the Timme family was full of infinite charm 
and many amusing little incidents. Dr. Timme grew a melon, 
which he kept in a cucumber frame. It was not a satis- 
factory melon, for it never grew to be larger than a tennis ball. 
It was hard and green. Nevertheless, one day Dr. Timme made 
the announcement that the melon would be ready for eating 
in a fortnight's time. " In vierzehn Tagen wird die Melone 
gegessen," were his actual words. Frau Doktor looked sceptical. 
When the fortnight had elapsed Timme brought in the melon, 
which was still no bigger and no softer, and said, " Heute essen 
wir die Melone" ("To-day the melon will be eaten"), and he 
cut it with difficulty into twelve bits. Frau Doktor said it was 
unripe, and not fit to be eaten, and that it was quite hard and 
green. " No," said Timme, " Dass ist die Sorte, sie bleibt immer 
griin" ("It is that kind of melon : an evergreen"). He added 
later, " Man sollie immer unreifes Obst essen. Die Thiere suchen 
sich immer unreifes Obst aus " (" One ought always to eat unripe 
fruit. Animals eat unripe fruit for choice "). 

I used often to visit the two aunts, Dr. Timme's sisters. 
They had a charming little house and a conservatory. Little 
Aenchen said one day that many people in the summer went 
to Switzerland or to Italy, but die Tante did no such thing — 
she merely moved into the conservatory. (Sie zieht nur in die 
Blumenstube.) One of the aunts had a passion for the opera, 
and knew the plot of every opera ever written, and kept the 
programmes, and was a mine of information on the subject. I 
once said something rather disparaging about Switzerland to 
her, and she could not get over this, and for ever afterwards she 
would say that whenever she looked at her album of Swiss 
photographs she used to say : " Gott! nein! dass Herr Baring das 
nicht mag ! " (" To think of Mr. Baring not liking that ! ") 

Sometimes she would invite us to tea, and we would have an 
Apfeltorte in the garden, and if it was fine the " Alte Tante " 
used to come down. Kurt's future used to be discussed, and the 
army was mentioned as a possible career. "No," cried the 
Alte Tante; "an officer's life is a brilliant misery" (" Ein 
gldnzendes Elend "). I said that in other professions you had 
the Elend without the Glanz, the misery without the brilliance, 
and she was delighted with this mot. 

My father, who finished his education in Germany, at 
Gotha (after having gone to school at Bath at the age of six in a 



GERMANY 131 

stage-coach), used always to say that there was nothing in the 
world for simplicity and charm to compare with the life in a 
small unpretentious household in the Germany of old days. 
He used to tell a story of some Coburg royal lady whom he met 
at Gotha saying to him after Queen Victoria's marriage to 
Prince Albert, " Wenn Sie nach England kommen, suchen Sie 
meinen Vetler Albrecht axis and grussen Sie ihn von mir " {" When 
you go back to England, look up my Cousin Albert and give 
him my love"). 

The simplicity and the charm he described were to be found 
in the Timme household at Hildesheim. In the cosy winter 
evenings, in the little drawing-room with its warm stove, when 
the lamp used to be put on the table opposite the place of honour, 
the sofa, against the wall at the end of the room, a bottle 
of beer and glasses would be brought, and Dr. Timme would 
light his cigar and suggest a game of Skat, and Onkel Adolph 
would stroll behind my chair and say : " Nein, Herr Baring, das 
diirfen Sie nicht spielen." Then perhaps Frau Timme's mother 
would look in and occupy the place of honour, and perhaps 
Tante Agnes (who was an unappreciated poetess) or Tante 
Emile (the opera lover), and perhaps a neighbour, Fraulein 
Schultzen, who received English girls in her house, or Frau 
Ober-Forster. Then Frau Doktor's mother would take out 
her knitting and the children would be discussed. " Ndchsten 
Monat," someone would say: " Ich bekomme neue Mddchen." 
Onkel Adolph and Dr. Timme would talk mild politics, and 
faintly deprecate the present state of things ; perhaps Herr 
Wunibald Nick would be there and sing a song—" Es liegl eine 
Krone im tiefen Rhein " — and deplore the amount of operas 
by well-known composers which were never performed. " Wird 
nicht gegeben," he would exclaim, after every item of his long 
list, or would almost weep from enthusiasm for the second 
act of Tristan, although no Wagnerite he. While this talk went 
on in the major key, in a subdued minor the aunts and Frau 
Doktor and Frau Ober Forster would tell the latest develop- 
ments of a neighbour's illness, and the climax of the tale would 
be reached by someone saying : " Dann liess sie den Arzt rufen " 
(" Then she sent for the doctor "). There would be a pause, 
and someone else would inevitably ask, " Welchen Arzt ? " 
(" Which doctor ? "), as there were many doctors in Hildesheim, 
and opinions were sharply divided on their merits. The answer 



132 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

would perhaps be : " Brandes," and then there would be a sigh 
of relief from some, a resigned shrug from others, as if to say : 
" Poor things, they knew no better." 

And the conversation would be vernunftig, and the old 
people would say that the big towns were spoiling everything, 
that life was a hustle and a rush, that Fraulein So-and-so was 
ein unverschdmtes Wesen, and would bewail, as in Heine's lovely 
poem, that everything had been better in their time : 

" Wie Lieb* und Treu' und Glauben 
Verschwunden aus der Welt, 
Und wie so teuer der Kaffee, 
Und wie so rar das Geld ! " 

And over all this scene, and through this talk, there would hang 
an indefinable wrapping of cosiness and warmth and Gemiith- 
lichkeit, and one had the same sense of utter simplicity and 
intimate comfort that a fairy-tale of Grimm gives one. I 
wonder whether the charm and the simplicity have disappeared 
from Germany, and whether, in spite of Imperialism, the war, 
frightfulness, or anything else, the same thing goes on in the 
same way, in hundreds of houses and families ! 

In any case, whether it exists now or not, it existed then ; 
and I was privileged to experience it, to enjoy it to the full, and 
to look back on it now, after so many years and when so much 
that is irreparable has come between it and me, with undying 
affection and gratitude, and with an infinitely sad regret. 

Once during the war, I had luncheon with one of the R.F.C. 
Squadron Messes, where I met a pilot who had learnt German 
at the Timmes'. We talked of them, of Atho and of Kurt, 
whom he had known grown-up, and at the end of luncheon 
that pilot, who was just off to fight the Germans in the air, and 
who was so soon to meet with death in the air fighting the 
Germans, said to me : " Prosit Timmes." 

In the summer, we would have tea in a little arbour in the 
garden, and in the mornings, both in winter and in the summer, 
towards eleven o'clock, when I was hungry, I would go and tell 
Frau Doktor, and she would take me to the kitchen and fry me 
herself some Spiegeleier and Speck. Towards the beginning 
of my first summer at Hildesheim a new lodger arrived in the 
shape of a German boy called Hans Wippern, the son of a 
neighbouring landowner, who had a large farm just out- 
side Hildesheim. Hans was at the school and was always 



GERMANY 133 

hungry. One day he had a slight bilious attack and didn't 
come down to Mittagessen, although he was much better. 
Frau Doktor said she thought Hans might fancy a pigeon. 
" Nein," said Timme, " Er soil hungern" ("He must fast"). 
But Frau Doktor surreptitiously sent up three pigeons to his 
bedroom. The food was delicious at the Timmes', and the great 
days were when we had Kartoffeln-puffer for Mittagessen, a sort 
of pancake made of potatoes, or as a great treat " Gdnzebratenr 
I used to go to the market in the lovely old Markt-platz with 
Frau Doktor on the days when she would buy a goose, and on 
the way back we would stop at Frau Brandes' confectionery 
and have a slice of Apfeltorte. Frau Brandes was a warm, 
welcoming saleswoman, and her confectionery was perfect. 

When the long holidays began it was settled that I would 
do best to go on a Rundreise and see what I could of Germany. 
Dr. Timme arranged my itinerary and I took a Rundreise Billet. 
I was to go to Frankfort, Nuremberg, Dresden, Leipzig, and 
perhaps Berlin, and so home again. I went back to Heidel- 
berg first and found Hubert Cornish had become an expert 
fencer. We attended many a Kneipe and saw a lot of the 
students, and once more I stayed with Professor Ihne. 

My recollections of this second visit to Heidelberg are 
merged with those of my first visit, and I cannot distinguish 
between the two. Hubert Cornish had to go home, and we 
settled to go to Cologne by steamer up the Rhine. We went 
past Bingen and Coblenz and Bonn and the rocks of the Lorelei, 
and we stayed a night at Cologne. There Hubert left me and 
went home, and I went back by train to Frankfort. Hubert 
had fired me with the desire to hear Wagner. He had heard 
many operas at Dresden. The result of his talk was that I 
decided to go to Bayreuth. We went one night to Mannheim 
to the opera, but I cannot recollect what we saw. At Frank- 
fort I heard the Mikado, and the Cavalleria Rusticana, which I 
had already heard at Hanover. From Frankfort I went to 
Nuremberg, and from Nuremberg to Bayreuth. I had tickets 
for one series of performances of the Bayreuth Festival, but 
when I arrived I found that there was a performance of the 
Meistersinger that very day, and I got a ticket for it at the 
station. I took lodgings in a little room in the town. I went 
off to the theatre, and the first notes of the orchestra enlarged 
one's conception of what an orchestra could be. It was a 



134 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

wonderful experience to hear these operas for the first time, 
at the age of eighteen before hearing any discussions about 
them, before knowing what they were about, when every 
note of the music and every scene of the drama were a 
revelation and a surprise. I heard the Meister singer, Parsifal, 
Tristan und Isolda, and Tannhauser. After the Meister- 
singer and Tristan, Tannhauser seemed tawdry and thin. 
These operas were all of them magnificently performed that 
year. Scheidemantel, Malten, Materna, and other stars from 
Vienna and Dresden were taking part in the Festival, but 
even then I thought the scenery ugly, especially the garden 
scene in Parsifal, which was made of crude vermilion and 
yellow tulips ; in the other operas, Tristan and the Meister- 
singer, the scenery was sober and adequate, and the lighting 
effects were wonderfully well managed, but all that was lost 
sight of in the orchestra conducted by Mottl. I do not suppose 
there has ever been any finer orchestra playing in the world 
than that which I heard when Tristan was performed that year. 
It seemed a pity the curtain ever went up, for Tristan, although 
he sang well, was an old man (Heinrich Vogt), and Isolda (Rose 
Sucher) was a little too massive. At Bayreuth, during the first 
series I attended, there were some people I knew, and during 
that series and the others I made friends with many other people 
whom I had never seen before. One day, during the entr'acte, 
the crowd automatically divided as two people passed by— a 
lady and her husband— and a space was made round them. 
The lady had a small, flowerlike head, and the dividing crowd 
near her looked, as she passed, more commonplace and commoner 
than it did already. On one of the off-days I saw the same 
lady again sitting at a table in a restaurant garden and read- 
ing aloud out of a Tauchnitz novel. At my table there were a 
Frenchman and his wife. "Dieu qu'elle est belle," said the French- 
man, staring. " Je ne dis pas qu'elle ne soit pas jolie," said the 
French lady, rather nettled. My best friend at Bayreuth was 
one of the second violins in the orchestra. He thought the 
operas were far too long, especially the second act of Tristan and 
Isolda, which he said was for the players more than flesh and 
blood could bear. He said it would^e no offence to Wagner 
to cut it, and after the performance he used to come out from 
the theatre terribly exhausted. We often had dinner together, 
and he told me a great deal about musical life in Germany. I 



GERMANY 135 

also made friends with an English musician who lived at Syden- 
ham, and we spent the off-days in the country together. I 
think I must have stayed for three series of performances, and 
I heard each of these operas three times. I went after this to 
Dresden, where I enjoyed the picture gallery, and so back to 
Hildesheim. In September I received a letter from Professor 
Ihne asking me to go back there. The Duke of York was with 
him, learning German, so I went once more to Heidelberg and 
stayed there over a fortnight. I went back to Hildesheim, and 
I had not been there long when I got a telegram telling me 
to come home at once. I knew my mother was ill, but a 
letter giving me details just missed me, as it went to Heidel- 
berg. I found my brother-in-law, Bobby Spencer, in London. 
He took a special to Bristol, as we had missed the ordinary 
night train, and we got to Membland next morning. Never 
had Membland looked more beautiful. The days were cloudless 
and breathless ; the foliage was intact but turned to gold, and 
bathed in the quiet October sunshine. I arrived just in time. 
A specialist came down from London, but there was nothing to 
be done. Cherie came down from Hampshire, and D., who had 
married Mr. Crosbie, came back and stayed in the house, but it 
was only for a few days. 

I went to London and stayed a day or two in Charles Street 
with my brother John. I spent a night at King's College, 
Cambridge, and then I went to Hildesheim on my way to 
Berlin, where it was settled I was to go. 

I was only a day or two at Hildesheim. Nothing could have 
been kinder than the Timmes were to me then, and Onkel 
Adolph, when he heard I had lost my coat, said : " Wenn alle 
Menschen so harmlos wie Sie wdren, Herr Baring, so wiirde die 
Welt ein reines Paradies sein, aber ! aber ! " 

In Berlin I stayed at first at an hotel, and then I took two 
rooms on the top floor of a house in the Unter den Linden. 
I knew no one in the town at first, but a few days after I was 
settled in my rooms I met my cousin, Arthur Ponsonby, who 
was learning German there too, and who was staying at a pension 
in the Potsdamer Strasse. Although I had seen him all my 
life I had not known him before, and we gradually made 
each other's acquaintance. As we were both fond of the 
theatre we went to plays together and saw a great many 



136 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

interesting things. Ibsen's Doll's House, which was admirably 
played at the Berliner Theater, and Sudermann's Die Ehre, 
some Shakespeare performances, in which Ludwig Barnay 
played, and many plays translated from the French. At the 
Residenz Theater there was an excellent comic actor called 
Alexander. One night we went to see Faust, Goethe's Faust, 
not Gounod's, performed at the Schauspielhaus, and when the 
opening speech, " Kobe nun, ach, philosophie," was declaimed 
the effect was tremendous. The scenes which followed were 
less effective on the stage, except those where Gretchen appears. 
One day we heard that a famous Italian actress was to perform 
in Berlin. Her name was Eleonora Duse. We had never 
heard her name mentioned, but the man who sold theatre 
tickets said she was a rival of Sarah Bernhardt. She was to 
open in the Dame aux Camelias. We took tickets, read the 
play beforehand in German, as we neither of us knew Italian, 
and we went on the first night. To see a play in a language 
you do not understand, however well you know the story, takes 
away half the pleasure, but we never had a doubt about the 
quality of her art. The beauty and pathos of her death scene 
were so great as to be independent of words and speech. Had 
she been acting in Chinese the effect would have been just as 
great. We saw her afterwards in the Doll's House, in which 
she was equally remarkable, and the scathing irony with which 
she lashed Helmer, the husband, was unforgettable. 

We also went to concerts, and once or twice to the opera, but 
the opera in Berlin was not a good one. 

I knew hardly any Germans while I was at Berlin. I had a 
letter of introduction to a Frau von Arnim, and one night I had 
dinner at her house. There were five or six officers present, 
all in uniform, and one of them described a day's hunting in 
England, and said that the meet was crowded with bildschone 
Frauen. The Ambassador at Berlin was Sir Edward Mallet, 
and he asked us to dinner sometimes. 

It had been my intention to attend the lectures of the Berlin 
University, and I was formally enrolled as a student. I matri- 
culated at the University, but the formalities before this was 
accomplished were so long, that by the time they were finished, I 
had little time left for a University career. However, I received 
a card which placed me outside the jurisdiction of the Berlin 
police and under the jurisdiction of the Univershy authorities, 



GERMANY 137 

but I only went to one lecture. I had private lessons in German 
throughout my stay. 

I read a good deal of miscellaneous books during my stay 
in Berlin, and Arthur Ponsonby introduced me to many new 
things, and opened many doors for me, especially in French 
literature. He gave me Tolstoy and Loti to read, and we both 
had a passion for Ibsen. I, on the other hand, plied him with 
Pater, Stevenson, and Swinburne. I was just at the age when 
one can digest anything in the way of books, and the sweeter it 
is the more one enjoys it. Afterwards much of the stuff I was 
greedily devouring then was to seem like the almond paste on 
the top of a wedding-cake. But in those days nothing was too 
luscious or too sweet. Arthur's taste was already more sober 
and grown-up ; the drama appealed to both of us, and we would 
spend hours discussing plays and players, and deploring the 
state of the English stage. 

At the end of December I went back to England and spent 
the last Christmas but one at Membland I was ever to spend 
there. 



CHAPTER VIII 
ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 

AFTER Christmas I stayed a few days with Cherie at her 
house at Cosham and with the Ponsonbys at the Isle 
of Wight. Uncle Henry Ponsonby said he had taken 
one book with him in the Crimean War, and he had read it 
through. This was Paradise Lost. The conversation arose 
from his quoting the. lines : 

" The mind is its own place, and in itself 
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven," 

and I happened to know where the quotation came from. I 
stayed for a few days with the Bensons at Addington. Arthur 
and Fred Benson were there, but none of the rest of the family. 
Fred Benson had just finished his novel, Dodo, and was cor- 
recting the proofs of it. I read the proofs. Arthur Benson 
had written a great many poems, which he read out to me. 
They were published later in the year. During the time I had 
spent at Hildesheim I had continued to write verse every now 
and then, and I used to send my efforts to Arthur Benson for 
his criticism. I had also written what must have been a childish 
play, a modern drama, but I had published nothing except a 
little verse in a Plymouth newspaper. While I was staying 
at Osborne with the Ponsonbys and also at Addington with the 
Bensons I heard a great deal about a Miss Ethel Smyth. Arthur 
Benson had told me about her at Eton. She was a friend of 
his family, and he used often to hear from her. She was a 
newer friend of my aunts and my cousins, and they talked a 
great deal about her. I heard about her wonderful singing, 
her energy, her vitality, her talk, how she had said that Mrs. 
Benson was " as good as God and as clever as the Devil " ; 
how I must hear her sing " l'Anneau d'argent," and her own 
Mass. It was arranged that I was to make her acquaintance. 



ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 139 

Her Mass was to be given at the Albert Hall, and I was invited 
by Mrs. Charles Hunter (Miss Smyth's sister) to hear it from 
her box. The box was full of Miss Smyth's hunting friends, 
who gave the music a respectful hearing, and when it was over 
we went to the Bachelors' Club and had supper. I sat next 
to Miss Smyth and we made friends at once. The next night 
I had dinner at Dover Street, where Mrs. Hunter was staying, 
and there I met General Smyth, Miss Smyth's father, and 
Mr. Brewster, an American by birth, a Frenchman by educa- 
tion, an Italian by residence. His appearance was striking ; he 
had a fair beard and the eyes of a seer ; a, contre jour, someone 
said he looked like a Rembrandt. His manner was suave, and 
at first one thought him inscrutable— a person whom one could 
never know, surrounded as it were by a hedge of roses. When 
I got to know him better I found the whole secret of 
Brewster was this : he was absolutely himself : he said 
quite simply and calmly what he thought. Nothing leads to 
such misunderstandings as the truth. Bismarck said the best 
of all diplomatic policies was to tell the truth, as nobody believed 
you. But even when you are not prepared to disbelieve, and 
suspect no diplomatic wiles, the truth is sometimes disconcerting 
when calmly expressed. I recollect my first conversation with 
Mr. Brewster. We talked of books, and I was brimful of 
enthusiasm for Swinburne and Rossetti. " No," said Brewster, 
" I don't care for Rossetti ; it all seems to me like an elaborate 
exercise. I prefer Paul Verlaine." I knew he was not being 
paradoxical, but I thought he was lacking in catholicity, 
narrow in comprehension. Why couldn't one like both ? I 
thought he was being Olympian and damping. When I got 
to know him well, I understood how completely sincere he 
had been, and how utterly unpretentious ; how impossible 
it was for him to pretend he liked something he did not like, 
and how true it was that Rossetti seemed to him as elaborate 
as an exercise. 

That night we went to a concert at St. James's Hall, 
and I saw again the familiar green benches where for so many 
years my mother had seats in Row 2. " You remind me," 
said a lady I was introduced to that night, " of a lady who 
used to come and sit here at the Pops in the second row, a long 
time ago." 

I can't remember where it was I first heard Ethel Smyth sing, 



140 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

whether it was in Dover Street or in her own little house, " One 
Oak." I remember the songs she sang — some Brahms, some 
Schubert, among others "Pause" and " Der Doppelganger," 
" l'Anneau d'argent," and " Come o'er the Sea," and I knew at 
once that I had opened a window on a new and marvellous 
province. The whole performance was so complete and so 
poignantly perfect : the accompaniment, the way the words and 
the music were blended, and the composer's inmost and most 
intimate intention and meaning seemed to be revealed and 
interpreted as if he were singing the song himself for the first 
time ; the rare and exquisite quality and delicacy of her voice, 
the strange thrill and wail, the distinction and distinct clear 
utterance, where every word and every note told without effort, 
and the whirlwind of passion and feeling she evoked in a song 
such as " Come o'er the Sea " or Brahms' " Botschaft." 

It was settled that I was to learn Italian, and for that pur- 
pose I went to Florence. I stayed in Paris a few days on the 
way at the Hotel St. Romain, Rue St. Roch, and I went to 
several plays and saw Bartet at the Theatre francais, in Le 
Pere Prodigue. Then I travelled to Florence in a crowded 
second-class carriage. I had expected Florence to be a dismal 
place, full of buildings like Dorchester House, grey and cold. 
It was cold when the Tramontana blew, but I had forgotten 
or rather I had not imagined the Italian sun. I arrived 
late, at one in the morning, and when I got up and saw the sun 
streaming from a cloudless blue sky on warm, yellow, sun- 
baked houses with red flat roofs, I was amazed. I stayed the 
first night I arrived at an hotel, and then moved into a pension 
at Lung'Arno della Borsa 2 bis, which belonged to Signora 
Agnese Traverse I began to learn Italian at once, and had 
lessons from a charming old Italian called Signor Benelli. 
Signor Benelli had been a soldier in Garibaldi's Army ; he 
was an intense enthusiast both in politics and literature — a 
Dante scholar and an admirer of the moderns : Carducci, 
and Gabriele d'Annunzio's early poems, which were not well 
known then. I never had a better master before or after- 
wards. He knew English well and revelled in English poetry, 
especially in Shelley and Keats. As soon as I got to understand 
Italian we read Dante, and I read the whole of the Divina 
Commedia aloud with Signor Benelli, all Leopardi, and a great 
deal of Tasso and Ariosto. I also made other discoveries for 



ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 141 

myself in other branches of literature. There was a large 
lending library at Florence, full of books in every European 
literature. I there discovered by myself the works of Anatole 
France and read Thais, Balthazar, and L'Etui de Nacre, le 
Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, and La Rotisserie de la Reine 
Pedauque. I read a great deal of Maupassant as well, the 
complete works of Merimee, some Balzac, and the plays of 
Dumas fils, and all the Sardou I could get hold of. I also had 
a few Russian lessons from a lady, but I did not go on with 
them as I had not the time. I made the acquaintance of 
Miss Violet Paget (Vernon Lee), who lived in a lovely little 
villa called " The Palmerino " on the Fiesole side of the town. 

The spring in Florence is a wonderful pageant. At first 
you do not see where there can be any room for it. The trees 
seem all evergreen — cypresses and silvery olives. The land- 
scape seems complete as it is. Then suddenly the brown hills 
are alive with wild, fluttering, red jagged-edged tulips. Large 
bunches of anemones, violets, and lilies of the valley are sold 
in the streets, and soon roses. Then the young corn shoots up, 
and all the hills become green and the cornfields are fringed 
with wild dog-roses, and soon the tall red and white lilies come 
out, and then the wistaria, and the Judas trees — a dense mass of 
blossom against the solid, speckless blue sky. 

In May I met Hubert Cornish at Naples and spent a few 
days with him, and we went for a night to Sorrento, and in 
June I went to Venice by myself and stayed there for one long 
and deliriously hot week. I saw the pictures, drifted about 
on the lagoon, and bathed at the Lido in the Adriatic, the only 
sea that is really hot enough. 

At the end of June I was back again in England. I was to 
go to Oxford or Cambridge, but to do either of these things 
it is necessary to pass an examination in which sums had to be 
done. At first I was going to Oxford, but it was thought that 
I would never be able to pass Smalls, so it was decided I should 
go to Cambridge, but in order to pass the examination before 
matriculating I had to go to a crammer's to brush up my Latin 
and Greek and try to learn Arithmetic. 

At the end of July I went to Eton and stayed with the 
Cornishes. Mr. Cornish had just been made Vice-Provost, and 
was moving into the Cloisters from Holland House. It was a 
hot, beautiful August and we spent most of our days on the 



142 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

river. One day there was a regatta going on at Datchet. As 
we passed it we made triolets on the events of the regatta. 
" My shirt is undone, here comes the regatta," one of them 
began. The incident that struck us most was the passage of 
Miss Tarver in a boat. She appeared to be in distress, and was 
weeping. This incident was at once put to verse in this triolet : 

" Oh ! there's Lily Tarver 

In oceans of tears, 
Like streams of hot lava, 
Oh ! there's Lily Tarver ! 
The regatta's loud brava 

Still rings in her ears. 
Oh ! there's Lily Tarver 

In oceans of tears ! " 

At Arthur Benson's one night I met Mr. Gosse, who 
was kind to me, and from that moment became a lifelong 
friend. 

I had written an essay on Collins, and Arthur Benson had 
sent it for me to Macmillan's Magazine. The editor did not 
print it, but he wrote me a letter about it, urging me to 
go on writing. While I had been at Florence I had written 
a complete novel, which I had sent to the publishers. The 
publishers' reader reported that it was worth printing, and 
offered to publish it on the half-profits system. I had the sense 
to put it in the fire. Everyone, said Vernon Lee to me once, 
should write a novel once, if only so as never to want to do 
it again. 

In August I went to Mr. Tatham, who lived near Abingdon, 
to prepare for my examination. At his house several boys were 
struggling with the same task and preparing to go to Oxford. 
Mr. Tatham did not teach me arithmetic — nobody could do 
that — but he taught me some Greek and Latin. We read 
the Plutus of Aristophanes, and some Catullus, and he led 
me into new fields in English literature. I enjoyed myself 
at his house quite immensely. Sometimes at dinner Mr. 
Tatham would laugh till tears poured down his cheeks, and 
once he laughed so much that he was almost ill and had to go 
upstairs to his room to recover. 

We used to make up triolets at meals, and at all times of 
the day, and while I was at Abingdon I had two little books of 
them printed called Northcourt Nonsense. 



ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 143 

One of them was written while dressing for dinner and after 
having been stung by a fly, and addressed to Mr. Tatham and 
sent to him by the maid. It ran thus : 

" May 1 wear a silk tie 

To-night at the table ? 
I've been stung by a fly, 
May I wear a silk tie ? 
I will bind it as high 

And as low as I'm able, 
May 1 wear a silk tie 

To-night at the table ? " 

to which Mr. Tatham at once sent this answer : 

" The tie that you wear 

May be wholly of silk, 
Or of stuff or mohair, 
The tie that you wear ; 
If the pain you can't bear, 

Better bathe it with milk, 
The tie that you wear 

May be wholly of silk." 

One of the boys who was preparing for Oxford was called 
Ralli, and he had great facility as a planchette writer. He 
could not write by himself, but as soon as anyone else put their 
hands on planchette at the same time as he did, it would write 
like mad. The things it wrote seemed to be nearly always 
what he had read and forgotten, sometimes an article from 
the Figaro, sometimes a passage from a French novel. Some- 
times it wrote verse. Ralli was a fluent poet, but wrote better 
verse without the aid of planchette than with. Sometimes 
the planchette board answered his questions, but with a flippant 
inconsequence. 

In October I went to Cambridge and passed into Trinity, 
leaving the Little Go to be tackled later. I had rooms in Trinity 
Street. Hubert Cornish was at King's. I was to go in for the 
Modern Language Tripos, which meant languages about as 
modern as Le Roman de la Rose and Chaucer. I went to a 
coach for mathematics, but this was sheer waste of time, as 
not one word of what I was taught ever entered my brain, nor 
did I improve one jot. 

I belonged to two debating societies — the Magpie and 
Stump, and the Decemviri — and used to speak at both of them 
quite often ; and to a society where one read out papers, called 



144 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

the Chit -Chat. I also belonged to the A.D.C., and played the 
part of the butler in Parents and Guardians, and that of the 
footman in the Duchess of Bayswater. 

In the summer term, during the May week, Hubert Cornish, 
R. Austen Leigh, and myself edited an ephemeral newspaper 
called the Cambridge ABC, which had four numbers and which 
contained an admirable parody of Kipling by Carr-Bosanquet. 

Here are some lines from it : 

" By Matyushin and Wilczek-land he is come to the Northern Pole, 
Whose tap-roots bite on the Oolite and Palaeozoic coal : 
He set his hand and his haunch to the tree, he plucked it up by the 

root, 
And the lines of longitude upward sprang like the broken chords of 

a lute ; 
And over against the Hills of Glass he came to the spate of stars, 
And the Pole it sank, but he swam to bank and warmed himself on 

Mars ; 
Till he came to the Reeling Beaches between the night and the day, 
Where the tall king crabs like hansom cabs and the black bull 

lobsters lay." 

Aubrey Beardsley was just becoming known as an artist, 
and we wrote to him and asked him to design a cover, never 
thinking he would consent to do so. He did, for the modest 
sum of ten guineas, and many people thought it was a clever 
parody of his draughtsmanship. 

At Trinity, Carr-Bosanquet was the shining light of the 
Decemviri Debating Society. At Eton he had edited the 
Parachute, which was far the best schoolboy periodical that 
had appeared there for years, and had written, in collaboration 
with two other boys, a book called Seven Summers, about Eton, 
which was afterwards withdrawn from circulation because for 
some reason or other the authorities objected to it. Next 
to A Day of my Life at Eton it is the best book about Eton 
life that has ever been written, and the only book of its kind. 
It certainly ought to be republished. The curious thing is that 
the objections to it, which to the lay mind are not perceptible 
(for a more harmless book was never written), were only made 
after it had been published for some time. 

Carr-Bosanquet used often to contribute poems of a light 
kind about topical events to the Eton Chronicle, and at Cam- 
bridge he wrote as wittily as he talked and spoke. He had 
rather a dry, kind sense of humour, saltlike sense, and an Attic 



ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 145 

wit, which pervaded his talk, his speeches, his finished and 
scholarly verse. We thought he was certain to be a bright 
star in English literature, a successor to Praed and Calverley, 
and perhaps to Charles Lamb ; but his career was distinguished 
in another line — archaeology — and he allowed himself no rival 
pursuit. Had he opted for literature, and the province of the 
witty essay and the light rhyme, he certainly could have achieved 
great things, as he had already done far more than show promise. 
His performance as far as it went was already mature, finished, 
and of a high order. There was at Trinity and at King's at 
this time, as I suppose there is at all times, a small but highly 
intellectual world, of which the apex was the mysterious 
Society of the Apostles, who discussed philosophy in secret. 
I skirted the fringe of this world, and knew some of its 
members : Bertram Russell, the mathematician ; Robert 
Trevelyan, the poet ; and others. One day, one of these in- 
tellectuals explained to me that I ought not to go to Chapel, as 
it was setting a bad example. Christianity was exploded, a 
thing of the past ; nobody believed in it really among the young 
and the advanced, but for the sake of the old-fashioned and the 
unregenerate I was bidden to set an example of sincerity and 
courage, and soon the world would follow suit. I remember 
thinking that although I was much younger in years than 
these intellectuals, and far inferior in knowledge, brains, and 
wits, no match for them in argument or in achievement, I was 
none the less older than they were in a particular kind of experi- 
ence — the experience that has nothing to do either with the 
mind, or with knowledge, and that is independent of age, but 
takes place in the heart, and in which a child may be sometimes 
more rich than a grown-up person. I do not mean anything 
sentimental. I am speaking of the experience that comes 
from having been suddenly constrained to turn round and look 
at life from a different point of view. So when I heard the 
intellectuals reason in the manner I have described, I felt for 
the moment an old person listening to young people. I felt 
young people must always have talked like that. It was not 
that I had then any definite religious creed. I seldom went to 
Chapel, but that was out of laziness. I seldom went to church 
in London, and never of my own accord. 

While I was at Heidelberg the religious tenets which I had 
kept absolutely intact since childhood, without question and 



146 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

without the shadow of doubt or difficulty, suddenly one day, 
without outside influence or inward crisis, just dropped away 
from me. I shed them as easily as a child loses a first tooth. 
In the winter of 1893, when I came back from Berlin, someone 
asked me why I didn't go to church. I said it was because I 
didn't believe in a Christian faith, and that if I were ever to 
again I would be a Catholic. That seemed to me the only 
logical and indeed the inevitable consequence of such a belief. 
In spite of this, dogmatic disbelief was to me always an in- 
tolerable thing, and when I heard the intellectuals talk in the 
manner I have described, I used to feel that people like Dr. 
Johnson had known better than they, but that in his day it 
was probable that the young and he himself talked like that ; 
it was one of the privileges of youth. I did not say this, 
however. I kept my thoughts to myself. I remember my 
spoken answer being that I did not care if my landlady thought 
an upright poker placed in front of the fire made it burn or not. 
If she liked to believe that, it was her affair. I didn't mind if 
she worshipped the poker. 

At King's my great friends were Hubert Cornish, Ramsay, 

who was afterwards Lower Master at Eton, and R A , 

the son of a distinguished soldier. A. was the most original of 
all the undergraduates I knew. He was a real scholar, with 
the most eclectic and rather austere taste in literature, and a 
passion for organ music. He was shy and fastidious beyond 
words. He could not endure being shaved at Cambridge, and 
used to go up to London twice a week for that purpose. He 
took no part in any of the clubs or societies. At the same 
time he was a devoted friend and a fiery patriot. He was so 
difficult to please about his own work that when he went up for 
his Tripos and had to do a set of Latin hexameters, he showed 
up a series of unfinished lines, " pathetic half -lines," a suggested 
end of hexameter, a possible beginning, the hint of a caesura, 
a few epithets, and here and there an almost perfect line, with 
a footnote to say " these verses are not meant to scan." He 
was a bibliophile, but collected faded second editions and never 
competed. He had a passionate admiration for Thomas Hardy's 
works, and a great deference for the opinion of his friends. 
One day when he was discussing literature with Hubert Cornish, 
Hubert said he liked a book which A. disliked. When A. heard 
this hesaidgently: "Of course if you like it, Hubert, Hike it too." 



ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 147 

This all happened in the period of the 'nineties. When 
people write about the 'nineties now, which they often do, 
they seem to me to weave a baseless legend and to create a 
fantastic world of their own creation. The 'nineties were, from 
the point of view of art and literature, much like any other 
period. If you want to know what literary conversation was 
like in the nineties you can hear it any day at the Reform Club. 
If you compare the articles on literature or art that appeared 
in the Speaker of 1892-3 with the articles in the New Statesman 
of 1921, you will find little difference between the two. 
The difference between the Yellow Book and periodicals of the 
same kind (The Owl, for instance), which were started years 
later, was chiefly in the colour of the cover. The fact is there 
are only a certain number of available writers in London, 
and whenever a new periodical is started, all the available 
writers are asked to contribute ; so in the Yellow Book you had 
practically the available writers of the time contributing — 
Henry James, Edmund Gosse, George Moore, Crackenthorpe, 
William Watson, John Davidson, John Oliver Hobbes, Vernon 
Lee, Le Gallienne, Arthur Benson, Arthur Symons, and Max 
Beerbohm. I think there is seldom any startling difference 
between the literature of one decade and another. When 
I was at Cambridge, England was said by the newspapers to 
be a nest of singing birds ; again the same thing was said when 
the Georgian poets began to publish their work ; but the same 
thing might be said of any epoch. Throughout the whole of 
English history there never has been a period, as yet, when 
England was not a nest of singing birds, and when a great 
quantity of verse, good, bad, and indifferent, was not being 
poured out. But it was said in the 'nineties that poetry was a 
paying business ; second-hand booksellers were speculating 
in the first editions of the new poets, just as they do now ; and 
to get the complete works of one poet, who had published 
little, one had to pay a hundred pounds. A society called the 
Rhymers' Club published two books called respectively the 
Book of the Rhymers' Club, and the Second Book of the Rhymers' 
Club, both of which were anthologies by living authors, and 
somewhat the same in intention as the Books of Georgian Poetry. 
Both these books are now rare and sought after by collectors. 
It is interesting to look at them now, and to look back in general 
on the poets of that day, and to see what has survived and what 



148 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

has been forgotten. These two anthologies by no means 
represented the whole of the poetic output and production of 
the day. They were not comprehensive anthologies of all the 
living poets, but the manifesto of one small Poetical Club. 
Taking a general bird's-eye view of literature and the literary 
world of that day, this is what you would have noted. Tenny- 
son was just dead. Swinburne was still writing, and published 
some of the finer poems of his later manner in a volume called 
Astrophel, in 1894. Stevenson was alive, and had just published 
the Ebb Tide. Meredith had but lately come into his own, 
and was hailed by old and young. Tess of the D' Urbervilles 
had enlarged the public of Thomas Hardy. Robert Bridges 
was issuing fastidious pamphlets of verse printed by Mr. Beech- 
ing at Oxford. Christina Rossetti was alive. Mr. Kipling 
published what are perhaps his greatest achievements in the 
short story in Life's Handicap in 1891, and his Many Inventions 
came out in 1892. His Barrack Room Ballads were published 
in 1892. His loud popularity among the public was endorsed 
by critics such as Henry James, Edmund Gosse, and Andrew 
Lang. Andrew Lang was still writing '• books like Genesis and 
sometimes for the Daily News," besides a monthly causerie in 
Longman's Magazine, and a weekly causerie in the Illustrated 
London News. Mrs. Humphry Ward's David Grieve was pub- 
lished in 1892 and acclaimed by the whole press. Edmund 
Gosse was collecting and preparing a volume of the verse of his 
maturity (published in 1894), and once a year produced a 
volume of delicate and perspicuous prose. Henley was writing 
patriotic verse and barbed prose in the National Observer, which 
was full of spirited, scholarly and brilliant writing. Charles 
Wibley was making a name. Max Beerbohm was making his 
debut. William W ; atson was discovered as a real new poet, and 
his " Wordsworth's Grave," and his " Lachrymae Musarum " won 
praise from the older critics, and attracted, for verse, great atten- 
tion. He was named as a possible laureate. John Davidson was 
said to have inspiration and fire, and to have written a fine 
ballad ; Norman Gale's Country Lyrics were praised ; Arthur 
Benson represented the extreme right of English poetry, and 
Arthur Symons the extreme left. Wilde had published a play 
in French, and his Lady Windermere's Fan was hailed as the 
best comedy produced on the English stage since Congreve. 
Pinero had startled London with his Second Mrs. Tanqueray 



ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 149 

and the discovery of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. In the Speaker 
Quiller-Couch wrote a weekly causerie, and George Moore put 
some of his best work in weekly articles on art, and Mr. 
Walkley some of his wittiest writing in weekly articles on the 
stage. Henry James was struggling with the stage, and John 
Oliver Hobbes was making a name as a coiner of epigrams. 
Harry Cust was editing the Pall Mall Gazette -and concocting 
delightful leaders out of the classics, with fantastic titles. E. F. 
Benson had published Dodo. Turning from the general to the 
particular, and to the Book of the Rhymers' Club, published in 
1892, the names of the contributors were : Ernest Dowson, 
Edwin Ellis, C. A. Greene, Lionel Johnson, Richard le Gallienne, 
Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, Ernest Rhys, T. W. Rolleston, 
Arthur Symons, John Todhunter, and W. B. Yeats. In the 
second series the same names occur with an additional one — 
Arthur Cecil Hillier. 

A reaction against supposed foreign influences was started 
and preached, and Richard le Gallienne called his book of verse 
English Lyrics to accentuate this ; but it is difficult to find any 
trace of this foreign influence in the verse of that day, except in 
some of the poems of Arthur Symons. When people write of 
the 'nineties now, they say that the verse of that period is all 
about pierrots, powder, and patchouli. The reason is perhaps 
that the most startling feature in the creative art of the period 
was the genius of Aubrey Beardsley, whose perfect draughtsman- 
ship seemed to be guided by a malignant demon. I have looked 
through the Books of the Rhymers' Club carefully, and I cannot 
find a single allusion to a pierrot, or even to a powder-puff. 
Here are the titles of some of the subjects : " Carmelite Nuns 
of Perpetual Adoration " ; " Love and Death " ; " The Path- 
finder " ; " The Broken Tryst " ; "A Ring's Secret " ; "A 
Burden of Easter Vigil " ; " Father Gilligan " ; "In Falmouth 
Harbour " ; " Mothers of Men " ; " Sunset in the City " ; 
" Lost " ; "To a Breton Beggar " ; " Song in the Labour 
Movement " ; " Saint Anthony " ; " Lady Macbeth " ; Mid- 
summer Day " ; " The Old Shepherd " ; "The Night Jar " ; 
" The Song of the Old Mother " ; "The First Spring Day " ; 
" An Ode to Spring." These subjects seem to me singularly 
like those that have inspired poets of all epochs ; it is difficult 
to detect anything peculiar to the 'nineties in a title such as 
" The First Spring Day," or " A Ring's Secret." 



150 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

The first Rhymers' Book contains Yeats' exquisite poem on 
the Lake of Innisfree, and some dignified verse by Lionel 
Johnson ; the second series contains a well-known poem by 
Ernest Dowson : "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my 
fashion." But I think I am right in saying that it was neither 
Yeats nor Lionel Johnson nor Dowson 's work in these antho- 
logies that attracted the greatest attention, but a lyric of Le 
Gallienne's called " What of the Darkness ? " which I remember 
one critic said wiped out Tennyson's lyrics. Tennyson's lyrics, 
however, went on obstinately existing, no doubt so as to give 
another generation the pleasure of thinking that they had 
wiped them out. While these singing birds were twittering, 
I remember one day at Cambridge buying a new book of verse 
by a man called Francis Thompson. Here, I thought, is an- 
other of the hundreds of new poets, but directly I caught sight 
of the " Hound of Heaven," I thought to myself " Here is some- 
thing different." I remember showing Hubert Cornish a poem 
called " Daisy," and saying to him, " Isn't this very good ? " 
It begins : 

" Where the thistle lifts a purple crown 

Six foot out of the turf, 
And the harebell shakes on the windy hill, 

O the breath of the distant surf." 

" Yes," said Hubert, " but the trouble is that everyone 
writes so well nowadays that it is hardly worth while for any 
new poet to write well. All can raise the flower because all have 
got the seed." 

The undergraduates had no great enthusiasm for any of 
these new writers. I mean the intellectuals among the under- 
graduates. But the booksellers were always urging us to buy 
them on the plea that they would go up. Some of them did, 
and those who speculated in Francis Thompson and Yeats did 
well. The curious thing is that the prose writers and the 
poets were supposed to be great sticklers for form, to be 
absorbed by the theory of art for art's sake, and to be 
aiming at impeccable craftsmanship. Looking back on the 
work of those poets now, their technique, compared to that 
of more modern poets, seems almost ludicrously feeble, but 
they seem to have had just what they were supposed to be 
without : a burning ideal to serve literature ; to have been 
consumed with the desire to bring about a renaissance in 



ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 151 

English literature and an English renaissance. There was one 
poet's name which was sometimes mentioned then, and which 
had come down to the 'nineties from other and older generations. 
The name has gone on being mentioned since, and will one day, 
I think, reach the safe harbour of lasting fame, and this was 
Michael. Field. Michael Field was a pseudonym which covered 
the remarkable personalities of two ladies, an aunt and a niece, 
who were friends of Robert Browning and of all the literary 
lights of their day, and who wrote a series of most remarkable 
dramas in verse and some extremely beautiful lyrics. 

John Lane, the publisher, used to come down to Cambridge 
sometimes, and I made his acquaintance and, through him and 
Mr. Gosse, that of many of the writers I have mentioned : 
John Davidson, Le Gallienne, and others. There was a society 
at this time in London called the Cemented Bricks, to which 
some of the litterateurs and poets belonged, which met at 
Anderton's Hotel in Fleet Street, and I was made a member, 
and on one occasion made a speech, and was down to read 
a paper, but I had to go abroad and this never came off. But 
what I chiefly remember about it is one occasion when Le 
Gallienne read a paper in which he passionately attacked the 
theory of art for art's sake, and insisted on the relative unim- 
portance of art compared with Nature, saying that a branch of 
almond blossom against the sky was worth all the pictures in 
the world. His paper was answered a month later by a young 
man who said this was the most Philistine sentiment he had 
ever heard expressed. This was while I was at Cambridge. 

I did little work at Cambridge, and from the Cambridge 
curriculum I learnt nothing. I attended lectures on mathe- 
matics which might just as well have been, for the good they 
did me, in Hebrew. I spent hours with a coach who wearily 
explained to me things which I didn't and couldn't under- 
stand. I went to some lectures on French literature, but all I 
remember of them is that the lecturer demonstrated at some 
length that the French written by many well-known authors 
was often ungrammatical and sometimes full of mistakes. 
The lecturer cited to support his case pages of Georges Ohnet. 
One hardly needed a lecturer to point out that Georges 
Ohnet was not a classical writer. The lecturer's aim was not 
to show the badness of certain authors, but to prove that the 
French of modern current literature was an independent living 



152 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

organism that was growing and developing heedless of classical 
models, grammatical rules, and academic authority. I think 
he would have done better had he pointed out how certain 
other authors were writing prose and verse of so great an ex- 
cellence that in the course of time their works might become 
classics. Boileau was one of the books to be read for the Tripos, 
and I had already read a great deal of Boileau and learnt his verse 
by heart as a child. I copied out the following lines in 1888 : 

" Helas ! qu'est devenu ce temps, cet heureux temps, 
Ou les rois s'honoraient du nom de faineants; 
S'endormaient sur le trone, et, me servant sans honte, 
Laissaient leur sceptre aux mains ou d'un maire ou d'un comte ? 
Aucun soin n'approchait de leur paisible cour : 
On reposait la nuit, on dormait tout le jour. 
Seulement au printemps, quand Flore dans les plaines 
Faisaient taire des vents les bruyantes haleines, 
Quatre boeufs atteles, d'un pas tranquille et lent, 
Promenaient dans Paris le monarque indolent." 

When I told Dr. Verrall that we were reading Boileau he was 
delighted. He said : " How I wish I was reading Boileau ; 
instead of which, when I have time to read, I read the latest 
Kipling story." He said he spent his life in vain regret for 
the books he wanted to read, but which he knew he never 
would read. He could not help reading the modern books, 
but he often deplored the sad necessity. I stuck up for the 
modern books ; I said I would far rather read Kipling than 
Boileau. I supposed in Boileau's time people said : " Here I 
am, wasting my time reading Boileau, which I must read so as 
to follow the conversation at dinner, when I might be reading 
le Roman de la Rose." 

Dr. Verrall was an amusing story-teller, and I remember 
his telling a story of two old ladies who, while they were 
listening to the overture of Lohengrin, looked at each other 
with a puzzled, timid expression, until one of them asked 
the other : "Is it the gas ? " Dr. Verrall told me he 
thought Rossetti's poem, the " Blessed Damozel," was 
rubbish. On the other hand, he admired his ballad, " Sister 
Helen." 

He said : " Why did you melt your waxen man, Sister 
Helen ? " was a magnificent, opening to a poem. 

In spite of having learnt nothing in an academic sense at 
Cambridge, I am glad I went there, and I think I learnt a good 



ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 153 

deal in other ways. I look back on it and I see the tall trees 
just coming out in the backs, behind King's College ; a picnic 
in canoes on the Cam ; bookshops, especially a dark, long 
bookshop in Trinity Street where a plaintive voice told one 
that Norman Gale would be sure to go up ; little dinner-parties 
in my rooms in Trinity Street, the food arriving on a tray from 
the College kitchen where the cook made crime brulee better 
than anyone in the world, and one night fireworks on the window- 
sill and the thin curtains ablaze ; rehearsals for the A.D.C., 
and Mr. Clarkson making one up ; long, idle mornings in 
Trinity and King's ; literary discussions in rooms at Trinity ; 
debates of the Decemviri in Carr-Bosanquet's room on the 
ground floor of the Great Court ; summer afternoons in 
King's College gardens, and the light streaming through the 
gorgeous glass of the west window in King's Chapel, where, 
listening to the pealing anthem, I certainly never dreamed of 
taxing the royal Saint with vain expense ; gossip at the Pitt 
Club in the mornings, crowds of youths with well-brushed hair 
and straw hats telling stories in front of the fireplace ; the 
Sunday-evening receptions in Oscar Browning's rooms full of 
Arundel prints and crowds of long-haired Bohemians ; the 
present Provost of Eton mimicking the dons ; and the endless 
laughter of those who could say : 

" We were young, we were merry, we were very, very wise, 
And the door stood open to our feast." 

I left Cambridge after my first summer term as I could not 
pass the Little Go, nor could I ever have done so, had I stayed 
at Cambridge for years. My life during the next five years 
was a prolonged and arduous struggle to pass the examina- 
tion into the Diplomatic Service. When I left Cambridge I 
went to Versailles, and stayed there a month to work at 
French. Then after a few days at Contrexeville, with my 
father, I went back to Hildesheim and stopped at Bayreuth 
on the way. 

That year Parsifal and Tannhduser were given, and for the 
first time at Bayreuth, Lohengrin. Mottl conducted ; Vandyk 
sang the part of Lohengrin. When I arrived at the station, 
after a long night's journey, I was offered a place for the per- 
formance of Parsifal that afternoon. I took it, but I was so 
tired after the journey that I fell asleep during the first act, and 



154 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

slept so soundly, that at the end of the act, I had to be shaken 
before I woke up. In the third act, it will be remembered that 
Lohengrin, when he reveals his parentage, his occupation, and 
his name, at Elsa's ill-timed request, mentions that his father's 
name was Parsifal. A German lady who was sitting near me, 
when she heard this, gave a gasp of relief and recognition, as 
if all were now plain, and sighed : " Ach der Parsifal ! " 

At Leipzig I ran short of money, and nobody would 
cash me a cheque, as I could not satisfy either the Hotel 
or the Bank or the British Consul (Baron Tauchnitz) that 
I was who I claimed to be. I telegraphed to the Timmes 
for money, and they sent it to the Bank for me by telegram, 
but even then the Bank refused to give it to me, as they were 
doubtful of rrty identity. Finally I got the Timmes to tele- 
graph it to the Hotel. The Consul was annoyed, and said that 
Englishmen always appeared to think they could go where 
they liked and do what they liked. I told him this was the 
case, and I had always supposed it to be the duty of a British 
Consul to help them to do so. I stayed at Hildesheim till Mr. 
Scoones' establishment for candidates for the Diplomatic Service 
examination opened at Garrick Chambers in London in Sep- 
tember. The examination for the Diplomatic Service was 
competitive. Candidates had to qualify in each of twelve 
subjects, which included three modern languages, Latin, 
modern history, geography, arithmetic, precis -writing, English 
essay-writing, and shorthand. The standard in French and 
German was high, and the most difficult task was the trans- 
lation of a passage from a Times leading article into French and 
German as it was dictated. Life at Scoones' meant going to 
lectures from ten till one, and again in the afternoon, and being 
crammed at home by various teachers. Mr. Scoones was a fine 
organiser and an acute judge of character. He was half French, 
and his personality was electric and fascinating ; he was 
light in hand, amusing, and full of point. He used to have 
luncheon every day at the Garrick Club, which was next door to 
Garrick Chambers, and he lectured himself on French. He was 
assisted by the Rev. Dawson Clarke, who in vain tried to teach 
me arithmetic, and did manage to teach me enough geography, 
after five years, to qualify, and Mr. J. Allen, who gave us brilliant 
lectures on modern history. There was also a charming French 
lecturer, M. Esclangon, who corrected our French essays. 



ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 155 

The first time I wrote him an essay he wrote on it : " Le 
Francais est non seulement pur mais elegant." 

I lived alone in a room at the top of 37 Charles Street, and 
worked in the winter months extremely hard. Special coaches 
used to come to me, and special teachers of arithmetic. One of 
them had a new system of teaching arithmetic, which was sup- 
posed to make it simple, but in my case the system broke down. 

Mr. Scoones told my father after I had been there a little 
time that I was sure to pass eventually. 

On Sunday evenings I used often to have supper with 
Edmund Gosse at his house in Delamere Terrace, and there I 
met some of the lights of the literary world : George Moore, 
Rider Haggard, Henry Harland, and Max Beerbohm. Some- 
times there would be serious discussions on literature between 
George Moore, Edmund Gosse, and Arthur Symons. I re- 
member once, when Swinburne was being discussed, Arthur 
Symons saying that there was a period in everyone's life when 
one thought Swinburne's poetry not only the best, but the only 
poetry worth reading. It seemed then to annihilate all other 
verse. Edmund Gosse then said that he would not be at all 
surprised, if some day Swinburne's verse were to appear almost 
unintelligible to future generations. He thought it possible 
that Swinburne might survive merely as a literary curiosity, 
like Cowley. He also said that Swinburne in his later manner 
was like a wheel that spun round and round without any 
intellectual cog. 

George Moore in those days was severe on Guy de Mau- 
passant, and said his stories were merely carved cherry-stones. 
Edmund Gosse contested this point hotly. Still more amusing 
than the literary discussions were those occasions when 
Edmund Gosse would tell us reminiscences of his youth, when 
he worked as a boy at the British Museum, and of the early 
days of his friendship with Swinburne. 

There was an examination for the Diplomatic Service that 
autumn, and I was given a nomination for it, but I was ill and 
couldn't compete. 

I went back to Hildesheim for Christmas. Christmas is 
the captain jewel of German domestic life, and no one who has 
not spent a Christmas with a German family can really know 
Germany, just as no one who has not lived through the Easter 
festival with a Russian family can really know Russia. It is 



156 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

only in Germany that the Christmas tree grows in its full glory. 
The Christmas tree at Hildesheim was laden with little tangerine 
oranges and sprinkled over with long threads of silver snow. 
When it was lighted, the carol : " Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht," 
was sung round it. The presents were arranged, or rather 
displayed, on a table under the tree : new presents, and a 
present of many years' standing, the Puppenstube, which took 
on a new life every Christmas by being redecorated, and having 
the small kitchen utensils in its dolls' kitchen refurbished. The 
presents were not wrapped up in parcels, but they were exposed 
to the full view of those who were about to receive them, and 
so arranged that they appeared at their very best, as though 
Santa Claus and a fairy godmother had arranged them them- 
selves. My present was a beautiful embossed dicky. 

On New Year's Eve, the Christmas tree was relit, and as the 
bells rang for New Year, we clinked glasses of punch and said : 
" Prosit Neujahr." If you want to know what is the spirit of 
a German Christmas you will find its quintessence distilled in 
the poem of Heine about " Die heil'gen drei Kon'ge aus M or gen- 
land," which ends : 

" Der Stern blieb stehn iiber Joseph's Haus, 
Da sind sie hineingegangen ; 
Das Ochslein briillte, das Kindlein schrie, 
Die heil'gen drei Konige sangen." 

While I was going through this complicated and protracted 
training, the date of the examination was, of course, only a 
matter of conjecture, but when an Ambassador died there 
was always an atmosphere of excitement at Garrick Chambers, 
and on Scoones' face one could clearly read that something 
momentous had occurred. As a rule the examinations 
happened about once a year. Having missed my first chance, 
which was fortunate, as I was woefully unprepared, I had 
to wait a long time for my second chance, and I spent 
the time between London, which meant Garrick Chambers, 
Germany, which meant Hildesheim, and Italy, which meant 
Madame Traverso's pension at Lung'Arno della Borsa 2 bis, at 
Florence. 

One night, at Edmund Gosse's, in the winter of 1905, Harland 
was there, and the conversation turned on Anatole France. I 
quoted him some passages from Le Livre de Mon Ami, which he 
had not read. The name of Anatole France had not yet 



ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 157 

been mentioned in the literary press of London, and Harland 
said to me : " Why don't you write me an article about him 
and I will print it in the Yellow Book ? " The Yellow Booh by 
that time had lost any elements of surprise or newness it had 
ever had and had developed into an ordinary review to which 
the stock writers of London reviews contributed. I said I 
would try, and I wrote an article on Anatole France, which was 
accepted by Harland and came out in the April number. This 
was the first criticism of Anatole France which appeared in 
England. In the same number there was a story by Anatole 
France himself, and a long poem by William Watson. When 
the proof of my article came, I took it to Edmund Gosse, and 
read it aloud to him in his office at the Board of Trade in White- 
hall. He was pleased with it, and his meed of generous and 
discriminating praise and encouragement was extremely welcome 
and exhilarating. He said there was a unique opportunity for 
anyone who should make it his aim and business to write grace- 
fully and delicately about beautiful and distinguished things, 
and that I could not do better than try to continue as I had 
begun. No one could have been kinder nor more encourag- 
ing. The University is not a stimulating place for aspiring 
writers. The dons have seen it all before so many times, and 
heard it all so often ; the undergraduates are so terribly in 
earnest and uncompromisingly severe about the efforts of their 
fellow-undergraduates ; so cocksure and certain in their judg- 
ments, so that at Cambridge I hid my literary aspirations, and 
when I left it I had partially renounced all such ambitions, 
thinking that I had been deluding myself, but at the same time 
cherishing a hidden hope that I might some day begin again. 
Edmund Gosse 's praise kindled the smouldering ashes and 
prevented them from being extinguished, although I was too 
busy learning arithmetic, geography, and long lists of obscure 
terms in French and German to think much about such 
things. 

One night that winter I went with my father and my sisters 
to the first night of the Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith at the Garrick 
Theatre. Sir John Hare and Mrs. Patrick Campbell both 
played magnificently, and Mrs. Campbell enjoyed a triumph. 
She held the audience at the beginning of the play by her grace, 
and by her quiet magnetic intensity, and then swept everyone 
off their feet by her outbursts of vituperation. Mr. Shaw, 



158 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

writing in the Saturday Review about it, said that one of the 
defects of the play, the unreality of the chief female character, 
had " the lucky effect of setting Mrs. Patrick Campbell free 
to do as she pleases in it, the result being an irresistible projec- 
tion of that lady's personal genius, a projection which sweeps 
the play aside and imperiously becomes the play itself. Mrs. 
Patrick Campbell, in fact, pulls her author through by playing 
him clean off the stage. She creates all sorts of illusions, and 
gives one all sorts of searching sensations. It is impossible 
not to feel that those haunting eyes are brooding on a momentous 
past, and the parting lips anticipating a thrilling imminent 
future, whilst some enigmatic present must no less surely be 
working underneath all that subtle play of limb and stealthy 
intensity of tone." After the third act the audience applauded 
deliriously, and the next day the critics declared unanimously 
that Mrs. Campbell had the ball at her feet. They all prophesied 
that this was the beginning of undreamed-of triumphs. They 
little dreamed how recklessly she would kick the ball. 

At Easter I went to Florence once more and stayed there 
far into June. I think it was that year I spent a little time at 
Perugia. One day I drove to Assisi. The country was in the 
full glory of spring. We passed groaning carts drawn by slow, 
white oxen ; poppies flared in the green corn ; little lizards 
sunned themselves on the walls ; one felt one was no longer in 
Italy, but in an older country, in Latium ; in some little kingdom 
in which Remus might have been king, or that kindly monarch, 
Numa Pompilius, with Egeria, his gracious consort. I saw the 
Italy that I had dreamt of ever since as a child I had read with 
Mrs. Christie in the Lays of Ancient Rome of " where sweet 
Clanis wanders through corn and vines and flowers," of milk- 
white steer grazing along Clitumnus, and the struggling sheep 
plunging in Umbro. And when at last Assisi appeared, with 
its shining snow-white basilica crowning the hill like a diadem, 
one seemed to be driving up to a celestial city. 

On the iSth of May, life was made exciting by an earth- 
quake. It happened about nine o'clock in the evening. We 
had just finished dinner at the pension. I had walked to my 
bedroom to fetch something, when there came a noise like a 
gas explosion or a bomb exploding, and I was thrown on to my 
bed. The pictures fell from the walls, and the ground seemed 
to be slipping away from one. Outside on the landing — we 



ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 159 

lived on the second floor of the Palazzo Alberti, up two flights 
of stairs — I heard the servants crying : " Sono i Ladri " (" The 
thieves are upon us "), and there was a scamper down the stairs, 
as the maid and the cook rushed down to bolt the front door 
and keep out the thieves. Then various objects of value were 
saved, or at least a mysterious process of salvage was begun. 
A box containing family deeds was carried from one room to 
another, and some American children were carried downstairs 
in a blanket. The shock, I think, lasted only seven seconds, 
but had been, while it lasted, intense. Then there was a good 
deal of bustle and discussion, and everybody suggested some- 
thing different that ought to be done ; and Madame Traverso 
carried on a conversation with the landlady of the house, who 
lived on the first floor. Relations between the two households 
had hitherto been strained, and a state of veiled hostilities had 
existed between them. The earthquake changed all this and 
brought about a reconciliation. From her window Madame 
Traverso called to the landlady and assured her that we were : 
" Nelle mani di Dio " (" We are in the hands of God "). " Si," 
answered the landlady : " Siamo nelle mani di Dio " (" Yes, 
we are in the hands of God "). Signora Traverso said we could 
not sleep in the house that night. It was not to be thought 
of, and we joined the population in the streets. No sooner had 
people begun to say it was all over, and that we could quietly 
go home, than another faint tremor was felt. People encamped 
in carriages ; others walked about the streets. The terror 
inspired by an earthquake is unlike any other, because you feel 
there is no possible escape from it. At eleven o'clock in the 
evening there was another faint shock. We got to bed late ; 
some of the inmates of the pension slept in a cab. The next 
day one could inspect the damage done. The village of 
Grassina near the Certosa had been destroyed. I had just 
been to the Certosa, and one of the monks there, an Irishman, 
when we asked him what the green liqueur was made of, that 
he sold, said : " Shamrocks and melted emeralds." Grassina 
was a village where on Good Friday I had seen the procession 
of Gesit Morto by torchlight, in the April twilight, with its 
centurions in calico and armour, its tapers, its nasal brasses 
and piercing lamentation, and crowd of nut -sellers ; a ceremony 
as old as the soil, and said to be a new incarnation of the 
funeral of Pan. 



160 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

The Palazzo Strozzi was rent from top to bottom with a 
huge crack. Pillars in Piazza dell'Anunziata had fallen down ; 
and at San Miniato, the school of the Poggio Imperiale had been 
seriously damaged. Had the shock lasted a few seconds longer 
the destruction in Florence would have been extremely serious, 
and many irreplaceable treasures would have been destroyed. 

The afternoon after the earthquake I bicycled out to see 
Vernon Lee, and she said that the butcher boy in her village 
declared that in the afternoon before the earthquake he had 
seen the Devil leap from a cleft in the ground in a cloud of 
sulphurous fumes and fires. In the night there was another 
slight shock towards one in the morning. I was asleep and 
I was woken suddenly, and experienced the strange sensation 
of feeling the floor slightly oscillating, but it only lasted a 
second or two, and that was the last of the earthquake. 

I made that year the acquaintance of Professor Nencioni, 
a poet and a critic, and a profound student of English 
literature and English verse. He was saturated with English 
literature, and his poems show the influence and impress of the 
English poets of the nineteenth century. He used to give 
lectures on English poetry in Italian ; he was a stimulating, 
eloquent lecturer, and his knowledge of English was amazing. 
I went to his lectures and made his acquaintance, and we had 
long talks about literature. He asked me if I had written 
anything, and I told him I had some typed poems, but that I 
had given up trying to write verse. He asked me to show them 
him. The next time I went to his lecture I took my typed 
MSS. and left it with him. The next Sunday after the lecture 
he came up to me with the MSS. in his hand and said : " Lei 
e poeta," and he said : " Never mind what anyone may tell 
you, / tell you it is a fact." I was greatly exhilarated by 
Nencioni's encouragement, but I thought that being a foreigner 
he was perhaps too indulgent, and I would have felt uncom- 
fortable had a Cambridge undergraduate overheard his con- 
versation. It had nevertheless an effect, and I thought that 
I would some day try to write verse again. 

Towards the end of the summer, I went back to Germany. 
E. (a Cambridge scholar) joined me at Hildesheim and stayed 
at the Timmes'. E. was the most painstaking and industrious 
pupil Professor Timme ever had, and he enjoyed the German 
life to the full, but it was his misfortune rather than his fault 



ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 161 

that he offended the easily ruffled susceptibilities of the Timme 
family. 

On one occasion he made what turned out to be an un- 
fortunate remark about the river Innerste, which is Hildesheim's 
river. He said it was dirty ; upon which Professor Timme, 
much nettled, said : " Das will ich nicht sagen. Sie ist viel 
reiner als mancher Fluss, der von einer Grosstadt kommt, und 
vielleicht ganz rein aussieht." [I won't say that ; it is much 
cleaner than many a river that comes from a big town and 
perhaps seems quite clean.] 

There was a delightful German pupil living in the house 
called Erich Wippern, a brother of Hans Wippern, who had 
been there before. We arranged to give a Kneipe for him 
and the other boys in one of the villages. The matter had been 
publicly discussed and seemed to be settled, but at the last 
minute, Professor Timme objected to it, and we had a long and 
painful interview on the subject. He said the Kneipe was not 
to be, and when I reminded him that he had already given his 
consent, he lost his temper. We decided after this distressing 
scene to go away, and we left for Heidelberg, our ultimate 
objective in any case, the next day. 

E. and I had invented a game which I think I enjoyed 
more than any game I have ever played at, with the exception 
of a good game of Spankaboo. It was called : " The Game." 
You played it like this : One player gave the other player two 
lines or more of poetry, or a sentence of prose, in any language. 
The other player was allowed two guesses at the authorship of 
the quotation, and, if he said it immediately after the second 
guess, breathlessly so to speak, a third guess ; but there must 
not be a second's pause between the second and the third. 
They had to be "double leads." The third had to come, if 
at all, helter-skelter after the second guess. If you guessed 
right you got a mark, and if you guessed wrong you got a 
nought ; the noughts and crosses were entered into a small 
book, which went on getting fuller and fuller. They were 
added up at the bottom of every page ; but as The Game 
is eternal, we shall never know who won it, until the Last 
Day, and then perhaps there won't be time. We both 
played it well on the whole, although we both had strange 
lapses. I never could guess a line out of Lycidas and E. 
never could guess a line out of Adonals. I attributed one 
ii 



162 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

day one of the finest lines of Milton to the poet Montgomery, 
and E. made an equally absurd mistake, which happened to 
have a profound effect on my future, or rather on my future 
literary aspirations. We were playing the game in the Bier- 
garten at Hildesheim. The band was playing the overture 
from Tannhauser. Schoolboys were walking round the garden, 
arm in arm, and when they met an acquaintance took off their 
hats all together, in time, and by the right, or by the left, as the 
case might be, held them at an arm's length and put them back 
stiffly. At many little tables, groups and families were sitting 
enjoying the music, drinking beer and eating Butterbrote. I 
said to E. : " Who is this by in The Game ? " which was the 
recognised formula for saying you had begun to play, because 
the game began suddenly in the midst of conversation and 
circumstance quite remote from it : no matter how inappro- 
priate or inopportune. The lines I quoted were these : 

" Sank in great calm, as dreaming unison 
Of darkness and midsummer sound must die 
Before the daily duty of the Sun." 

" Oh," said E., without any hesitation, "it's magnificent — 
Shakespeare." 

"No," I said, " it is not by Shakespeare ; it is the end of a 
sonnet by Maurice Baring, written at Hildesheim in 1892." 

Now I had shown the poem in which these lines occurred 
with others to some undergraduates at Cambridge, possibly to 
E. himself, and had been told the stuff was deplorable, which no 
doubt it was, but this had so damped my spirits that I had 
resolved never to try and write verse again. Then came 
Nencioni's praise (who had marked these very lines in blue 
pencil), and I partially reconsidered my decision. Now came 
this incident, which opened a shut door for me. It was not 
that I didn't know that in this Game one was capable of any 
aberrations. It was not that I took myself seriously, but 
the mere fact of E. making such a mistake convinced me that 
mistakes in my favour were possible. Nencioni might be right 
after all. In any case, there was no reason why I should not 
try ; and two days later I produced a sonnet, which E. 
entirely approved of, and which I afterwards published. 

It was a great game ; it included not only verse and prose, 
but sayings of great and small men, and even of personal 



ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 163 

acquaintances. We were both at our best in guessing things 
from books we had never read. I had an unerring ear for Zola's 
prose, which I had then read little of, and E., whose reading 
was far wider and deeper than mine, was very hard to baffle 
except, as I have already said, by quoting Shelley's Adonais, 
which he ended by learning by heart. 

At Heidelberg I introduced E. to Professor Ihne. Pro- 
fessor Ihne, confronted, in the shape of E., with an under- 
graduate, or rather with a graduate, who had just taken his 
degree, and had won academical distinctions, was in his most 
Johnsonian mood, and contradicted him even when he agreed 
with him. He asked E. what degree he had taken at Cambridge, 
and when E. said : " Palaeography," Ihne, with a smile, said : 
" Oh, that's all nonsense." The Professor turned the con 
versation on to his favourite topic : the superfluity of the 
Norman element in the English language ; the sad occurrence 
of the word pullulate in a Times article was mentioned, and E. 
made a spirited defence of the phrase : " Assemble and meet 
together," which he said was a question of rhythm. " Pooh ! " 
said Ihne, " it's only association makes you think that." The 
word "to get," he said, was used to denote too many things. 
Poor E. was interpellated, as if he, and he alone, had been 
responsible for the shortcomings of the English language 
He used, said Ihne, the word education when he meant 
instruction. " One is instructed at school," he said. He 
asked E. for the derivation of the word caterpillar. E. had 
no suggestion to offer. Ihne said he derived it from Kater 
and to pill, but he had also given KaOepTrifa a thought. Then 
the talk veered round to literature. " Schiller," said Ihne, 
" is a greater dramatic poet than Shakespeare. Shakespeare's 
tragedies are too painful ; King Lear and Othello are unbear- 
able." E. said, unwisely, that Schiller's women were so un- 
interesting. Ihne said that that was a thing E. could know 
nothing about, as he was not a married man. For his part, and 
he had been a married man, Schiller's characters, and especially 
Thekla, were the most beautiful women characters that had 
ever been drawn. E. tried to defend Shakespeare, and pointed 
out the qualities of Shakespeare's women. He mentioned 
Portia. " No," said Ihne ; " Portia is not a good character, 
because she oversteps her duties as counsel and tries to play 
the part of a judge." " I consider Lord Byron," said Ihne, 



164 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

" the finest English poet of the century." E. said Byron had 
a great sense of rhythm. " If he had merely a great sense of 
rhythm," said Ihne, " he wouldn't have been a great poet." E., 
to propitiate him, said something laudatory about Goethe's 
Faust. Ihne at once said that Schiller was a greater poet than 
Goethe, because Faust was a collection of detached scenes, and 
Schiller's plays were complete wholes. 

We saw Professor Ihne several times, and what I have 
described is typical of all our conversations. 

After staying at Heidelberg for about a week I went back 
to London, and the routine of Garrick Chambers began once 
more. 



CHAPTER IX 
OXFORD AND GERMANY 

THE time soon came when I had to go up for my first 
examination, and before it there was a period of in- 
tensive cramming. I had scores of teachers, and spent 
hour after hour taking private lessons in Latin, German, short- 
hand, and arithmetic. A great deal of this cramming was quite 
unnecessary, as it did not really touch the vital necessities of the 
examination. I read a great deal of German ; all Mommsen, 
a great deal of French, and all Renan ; but literary French 
and German were not what was needed ; long lists of technical 
words were far more necessary. The cliches of political leader- 
writers ; the German for a belligerent, and the French for a 
Committee on Supply ; an accurate knowledge of where the 
manufacturing cities of England were situated, and the solu- 
tion of problems about one tap filling a bath half again as quickly 
as another emptied it. I spent a great deal of time, but not 
enough as it turned out, making lists of obscure technical words. 
I learnt the Latin for prize-money, which I was told was a useful 
word for " prose," but unfortunately the word prize-money did 
not occur in the Latin translation paper. The word is manubice. 
I am glad to know it. It is indeed unforgettable. 

We were examined orally in French, German, and in Italian. 
When I was confronted with the German examiner, the first 
thing he asked me was whether I could speak German. I was 
foolishly modest and answered: " Ein wenig " ("A little"). 
" Very well," he said, " it will be for another time." I made 
up my mind that next time I went up I would say I spoke German 
as well as Bismarck, and wrote it better than Goethe. 

I kept my resolution the last time I went up for the examina- 
tion, and it was crowned with success. 

Here is one of the arithmetic questions from the examina- 
tion paper set in 1894 : 

16s 



166 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

" What vulgar fraction expresses the ratio of 17! square 
yards to half an acre ? " (I am told this is an easy sum.) 

Here is a sentence which had to be translated into German 
as it was dictated in English : 

" Factions are formed upon opinions ; which factions be- 
come in effect bodies corporate in the state ; — nay, factions 
generate opinions in order to become a centre of union, and to 
furnish watchwords to parties ; and this may make it expedient 
for government to forbid things in themselves innocent and 
neutral." 

Here is a geography question of the kind I found most 
baffling : 

" Make a sketch of the country between the Humber and 
the Mersey on the south, and the Firth of Forth and Clyde on 
the north." 

When I went up for the examination, I think it was in 
January 1896, I failed both in geography and arithmetic, and so 
had to begin the routine of cramming all over again. All the 
next year I rang the changes again on Florence, Hildesheim, and 
Scoones. When the examination was over, I went abroad with 
Claud Russell, and we went to Paris and Monte Carlo. Lord 
Dufferin was Ambassador in Paris, and we dined with him once 
or twice. 

We saw Guitry and Jeanne Granier perform Maurice 
Donnay's exquisite play, Amants. 

At Monte Carlo we stayed with Sir Edward Mallet in his 
"Villa White." A brother of Lord Salisbury, Lord Sackville 
Cecil, was staying there. He had a passion for mechanics ; 
we had only to say that the sink seemed to be gurgling, or 
the window rattling, or the door creaking, and in a moment 
he would have his coat off, and, screwdriver in hand, would set 
to work plumbing, glazing, or joining. 

One night after dinner, just to see what would happen, I said 
the pedal of the pianoforte seemed to wheeze. In a second he 
was under the pianoforte and soon had it in pieces. He found 
many things radically wrong, and he was grateful to me for 
having given him the opportunity of setting them right. Sir 
Edward Mallet had retired from the Diplomatic Service. The 
house where we stayed, and which he had designed himself, 
was a curious example of design and decoration. It was de- 
signed in the German Rococo style, and in the large hall stucco 



OXFORD AND GERMANY 167 

pillars had for capitals, florid, gilded, coloured, and luxuriant 
moulded festoons which represented flames, and soared into 
the ceiling. 

One afternoon Lord Sackville Cecil said he wanted to see 
the gambling-rooms. We went for a walk, and on our way 
back stopped at the rooms. Lord Sackville Cecil was not an 
elegant dresser ; his enormous boots after our walk were covered 
with dust, and his appearance was so untidy that the attendant 
refused to let him in. I suggested his showing a card, but his 
spirit rebelled at such a climb-down, and we went home without 
seeing the rooms. 

From Monte Carlo I went to Florence. I went back to my 
pension but also stayed for over a week with Vernon Lee at her 
villa. Her brother, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, who had been on 
his back a helpless invalid for over twenty years, had suddenly, 
in a marvellous manner, recovered, and his first act had been 
to climb up Mount Vesuvius. 

I recollect the great beauty and the heat of that month of 
March at Florence. Giotto's Tower, and the graceful dome of 
the Cathedral, seen from the plain at the foot of San Gervasio, 
looked more like flowers than like buildings in the March 
evenings, across vistas of early green foliage and the delicate 
pageant of blossom. 

We went for many delightful expeditions : to a farmhouse 
that had belonged to Michael Angelo at Carregi ; to the Villa 
Gamberaia with its long grass terrace and its tall cypresses — 
a place that belongs to a fairy-tale ; and I remember more 
vividly than all a wine-press in a village with wine-stained vats, 
large barrels, and a litter of farm instruments under the sun- 
baked walls — a place that at once conjured up visions of southern 
ripeness and mellowness. It seemed to embody the dreams 
of Keats and Chenier, and took me once more to the imaginary 
Italy which I had built when I read in the Lays of Ancient 
Rome of " the vats of Luna " and " the harvests of Arretium." 

Then came a summer term at Scoones, distracted and 
dislocated by many amusements. I went to the Derby that 
year and backed Persimmon ; to the first performance of 
Mrs. Campbell's Magda the same night ; I saw Duse at Drury 
Lane and Sarah Bernhardt at Daly's ; I went to Ascot ; I 
went to balls ; I stayed at Panshanger ; and at Wrest, at 
the end of the summer, where a constellation of beauty moved 



168 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

in muslin and straw hats and yellow roses on the lawns of 
gardens designed by Lenotre, delicious with ripe peaches on old 
brick walls, with the smell of verbena, and sweet geranium ; 
and stately with large avenues, artificial lakes and white 
temples ; and we bicycled in the warm night past ghostly 
cornfields by the light of a large full moon. 

In August I went back to Germany, and heard the Ring 
at Bayreuth. Mottl conducted. But of all that sound and 
fury, the only thing that remains in my mind is a French lady 
who sat next to me, and who, when Siegfried's body was carried 
by to the strains of the tremendous funeral march, burst into 
sobs, and said to me : " Moi aussi j'ai un fils, Monsieur." Then 
in London I made a terrific spurt, and worked all day and far 
into the night to make ready for another examination which 
took place on November 14. I remember nothing of this 
long nightmare. As soon as the examination was over, I 
started with Claud Russell for Egypt. We went by train to 
Marseilles, and then embarked in a Messagerie steamer. I 
spent the time reading Tolstoy's War and Peace for the first 
time. The passengers were nearly all French, and treated us 
with some disdain ; but Fate avenged us, for when we arrived 
at Alexandria, we were, in obedience to the orders of my uncle 
(Lord Cromer), allowed to proceed at once, while the rest of the 
passengers had to wait in quarantine. We went to Cairo, 
and stayed at the Agency with my uncle. The day we arrived 
it was pouring with rain which, we were told, was a rare occur- 
rence in Cairo. 

We used to have breakfast on a high verandah outside our 
bedrooms, off tiny little eggs and equally small fresh bananas. 

At luncheon the whole of the diplomatic staff used to be 
present, and usually guests as well. The news came to Cairo 
that I had failed to pass the examination, in geography and 
arithmetic. Claud Russell, I think, qualified, and was given 
a vacancy later. 

In the evening my uncle used sometimes to read us passages 
of abuse about himself in the local press. One phrase which 
described him as combining the oiliness of a Chadband with 
the malignity of a fiend delighted him. He gave us the MSS. 
of his book, Modem Egypt, which was then only partly written, 
to read. He was never tired of discussing books : the Classics, 
French novels, the English poets of the eighteenth century. 



OXFORD AND GERMANY 169 

He could not endure the verse of Robert Browning. His 
admiration for French prose was unbounded and for the French 
gift of expression in general, their newspaper articles, their 
speeches, and, above all, their acting. 

Sometimes we rode to the Pyramids, and one day we had 
tea with Sir Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt in their Arab house. 

We did not stay long in Cairo ; we went up the Nile. The 
first part of the journey, to a station whose name I forget, was 
by train ; and once, when the train stopped in the desert, the 
engine-driver brought Claud Russell a copybook and asked him 
to correct an English exercise he had just done. Claud said 
how odd we should think it if in England the engine-driver 
brought us an exercise to correct. 

Then we embarked in the M.S. Cleopatra and steamed to 
Luxor, where we saw the sights : the tombs of the kings, the 
temple of Carnac, the statue of Memnon. We bathed in the 
Nile, and smoked hashish. 

We were back in Europe by Christmas, and spent Christmas 
night in the waiting-room of Turin railway station playing chess ; 
and when we arrived in London the momentous question arose, 
what was I to do to pass the examination ? We were only 
allowedthree tries, and my next attempt would be my last chance. 

The large staff of teachers who were cramming me were in 
despair. I was told I must pass the next time. 

The trouble was that the standard of arithmetic demanded 
by this examination was an elementary standard, and I had now 
twice attained by cramming a pitch I knew I should never 
surpass. At Scoones' they said my only chance lay in getting 
an easy paper. It was said that my work had been wrong not 
in degree but in kind. I had merely wasted time by reading 
Renan and Mommsen ; other candidates, who had never read 
a German book in their lives, by learning lists of words got 
more marks than I did. Herr Dittel, who gave me private 
lessons in German, said that he could have sent a German essay 
of mine to a German magazine. But not knowing the German 
for " belligerent," I was beaten by others who knew the language 
less well. The same applied to the French in which I was only 
second, although perhaps in some ways the best French scholar 
among the candidates. 

It seemed useless for me to go back to Scoones' and useless 
to go abroad. After much debate and discussion the matter 



170 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

was settled by chance. I made the acquaintance of Auberon 
Herbert in the winter, and instead of going to a crammer's I 
settled to go and live at Oxford, and I took rooms at King 
Edward Street and went to coaches in Latin and arithmetic. 
For two terms I lived exactly as an undergraduate, and there 
was no difference between my life and that of a member of 
Balliol except that I was not subject to College authority. 

Then began an interlude of perfect happiness. I did a 
little work but felt no need of doing any more, as, if anything, 
I had been overcrammed and was simply in need of digestion. 
I rediscovered English literature with Bron, and shared in his 
College life and in the lives of others. Life was a long series 
of small dramas. One night Bron pulled the master's bath- 
chair round the Quad, and the matter was taken with the 
utmost seriousness by the College authorities. A College meeting 
was held, and Bron was nearly sent down. Old Balliol men 
would come from London and stay the night : Claud Russell 
and Antony Henley. Arnold Ward was engrossed in Tur- 
genev ; Cubby Medd, — or was that later ? — who gave promise 
of great brilliance, was spellbound by Rossetti. And then 
there were the long, the endlessly long, serious conversations 
about the events of the College life and athletics and the 
Toggers and the Anna and the Devor. It was like being at 
Eton again. Indeed, I never could see any difference between 
Eton and Balliol. Balliol seemed to me an older edition of 
Eton, whereas Cambridge was to me a slightly different world, 
different in kind, although in many ways like Oxford ; and, 
although neither of them know it, and each would deny it 
vehemently, they are startlingly like each other all the same. 

I knew undergraduates at other Colleges as well as at 
Balliol and a certain number of the Dons as well. 

I also knew a good many of the old Balliol men who used to 
come down to Oxford and sometimes stay in King Edward Street. 

Then came the summer term. We had a punt, and Bron 
Herbert, myself, and others would go out in it and read aloud 
Wells' Plattner Story and sometimes Alice in Wonderland, and 
sometimes from a volume of Swinburne bound in green shagreen 
— an American edition which contained " Atalanta in Calydon " 
and the " Poems and Ballads." That summer I made friends 
with Hilary Belloc, who lived at Oxford in Holywell and was 
coaching young pupils. 



OXFORD AND GERMANY 171 

I had met him once before with Basil Blackwood, but all he 
had said to me was that I would most certainly go to hell, and 
so I had not thought it likely that we should ever make friends, 
although I recognised the first moment I saw him that he was 
a remarkable man. 

He had a charming little house in Holywell, and there he 
and Antony Henley used to discuss all manner of things. 

I had written by now a number of Sonnets, and Belloc 
approved of them. One of them he copied out and hung up 
in his room on the back of a picture. I showed him too the 
draft of some parodies written in French of some French authors. 
He approved of these also, and used to translate them to his 
pupils, and make them translate them back into French. 

Belloc was writing a book about Danton, and from time 
to time he would make up rhymes which afterwards became 
the Bad Child's Book of Beasts. The year before I went to 
Oxford he had published a small book of verse on hard paper 
called Verses and Sonnets, which contained among several 
beautiful poems a poem called "Auvergnat." I do not think 
that this book excited a ripple of attention at the time, and 
yet some of the poems in it have lived, and are now found in 
many anthologies, whereas the verse which at this time was 
received with a clamour of applause is nearly all of it not only 
dead but buried and completely forgotten. 

We had wonderful supper-parties in King Edward Street. 
Donald Tovey, who was then musical scholar at Balliol, used to 
come and play a Wagnerian setting to a story he had found in 
Punch called the " Hornets," and sometimes the Wallstein 
Sonata. He discussed music boldly with Fletcher, the Rowing 
Blue. Belloc discoursed of the Jewish Peril, the Catholic 
Church, the "Chanson de Roland," Ronsard, and the Pyrenees 
with indescribable gusto and vehemence. 

People would come in through the window, and syphons 
would sometimes be hurled across the room ; but nobody was 
ever wounded. The ham would be slapped and butter thrown 
to the ceiling, where it stuck. Piles of chairs would be placed 
in a pinnacle, one on the top of the other, over Arthur Stanley, 
and someone would climb to the top of this airy Babel and drop 
ink down on him through the seats of the chairs. Songs were 
sung ; port was drunk and thrown about the room. Indeed 
we had a special brand of port, which was called throwing port, 



172 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

for the purpose. And then again the evenings would finish in 
long talks, the endless serious talks of youth, ranging over every 
topic from Transubstantiation to Toggers, and from the last 
row with the Junior Dean to Predestination and Free-will. 
We were all discovering things for each other and opening for 
each other unguessed-of doors. 

Donald Tovey used to explain to us how bad musical Hymns 
Ancient and Modem were, and tried (and failed) to explain me 
the Chinese scale ; Belloc would quote the " Chanson de Roland " 
and, when shown some piece of verse in French or English that 
he liked, would say : " Why have I not known that before ? " 
or murmur: "Good verse. Good verse." Antony Henley 
used to quote Shakespeare's lines from Henry V. : 

" We would not die in that man's company 
Who fears his fellowship to die with us," 

as the most satisfying lines in the language. And I would 
punctuate the long discussions by playing over and over again 
at the pianoforte a German students' song : 

" Es hatten drei Gesellen ein fein Collegium," 

and sometimes translate Heine's songs to Belloc. 

Best of all were the long summer afternoons and evenings 
on the river, when the punt drifted in tangled backwaters, and 
improvised bathes and unexpected dives took place, and a hazy 
film of inconsequent conversation and idle argument was spun 
by the half -sleeping inmates of the wandering, lazy punt. 

During the Easter holidays I went back to Hildesheim for 
the last time as a pupil. Sometimes when I was supposed to 
be working, Frau Timme would find me engaged in a literary 
pursuit, and she would say : " Ach, Herr Baring, lassen Sie diese 
Schriftstellerei und machen Sie Ihr Examen " (" Leave all that 
writing business and pass your examination "). 

Before saying a final good-bye to Hildesheim, I will try to 
sum up what chiefly struck me in the five years during which 
I visited Germany constantly. Nearly all the Germans I 
met, with few exceptions, belonged to the bourgeois, the pro- 
fessional class, the Intelligentsia ; and they used to speak their 
mind on politics in general and on English politics in particular 
with frankness and freedom. 

I believe that during all this period our relations with Ger- 



OXFORD AND GERMANY 173 

many were supposed to be good. Lord Salisbury was directing 
the foreign policy of England, and his object was to maintain 
the balance of power in Europe : friendly relations with both 
Germany and France, without entangling England in any 
foreign complications. 

The English then, as Bismarck said, were bad Europeans. 
It would have perhaps been better for England if it had been 
possible for them to continue to be so. 

But the Germans I saw never thought that the relations 
between the two countries were satisfactory, and they laid 
the whole blame on England. I never once met a German 
who said it would be a good thing for Germany and England 
to be friends, with the exception of Professor Ihne. But I 
constantly met Germans who said Germany might be friends 
with England but England made it impossible. England, they 
said, was the spoil-sport of Germany. I was at Hildesheim 
when the cession of Heligoland to Germany was announced. 
"England," said the Germans, " ist sehr schlau" ("The 
English are very sly"). They thought they had made a bad 
bargain. 

So even, when they had gained an advantage, it escaped their 
notice ; and they always thought they had been cheated and 
bamboozled. What opened my eyes more clearly still was the 
instruction given to the schoolboys ; the history lessons during 
which no opportunity was ever lost of belittling England, 
and above all the history books, the Weltgeschichten (World- 
histories), which the boys used to read for pleasure. 

In these histories of the world, the part that England played 
in mundane affairs was made to appear either insignificant, 
baleful, or mean. England was hardly mentioned during the 
earlier periods of history. There was hardly anything about 
the England of the Tudors, or the Stuarts, but England's role 
in the Napoleonic Wars, in which England was the ally of Ger- 
many, was made to appear that of a dishonest broker, a clever 
monkey making the foolish cats pull the chestnuts out of the 
fire. The whole of England's success was attributed to money 
and money-making. " Sie haben," the Timmes used con- 
stantly to say, " den grossen Geldbeutel " (" You have the 
large purse "). It was not only the Timmes who used to rub 
this in, in season and out of season, but casual strangers one 
met in the train or drinking beer at a restaurant. 



174 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

My impression was that Germans of this class detested 
England as a nation, in a manner which Englishmen did not 
suspect. 

" Die Engldnder sind nicht mutig aber py alien konnen Sie " 
(" The English are not brave, but they know how to boast "), 
a bo3^ once said to me. 

They constantly used to lay down the law about English 
matters and conditions of life in England which they knew 
nothing of at all. In England, they used to say, people do 
such and such a thing. The English have no this or no that. 
Above all, " Kein Bier," and when I said there was such a thing 
as beer in England, they used to answer : " Ach, das Pale-Ale, 
aber kein Bierkomment," which was indeed true. 

During the time I spent in Hildesheim you could have 
heard every single grievance that was used as propaganda in 
neutral countries during the European War, and when I was 
in Italy during the war, Italians expressed opinions to me 
which were obviously German in inspiration and were echoes 
of what I used to hear in Hildesheim. 

I never met a German who had been to England, but they 
always had the most clearly denned and positive views of 
every branch of English life. When I was at school at Hilde- 
sheim, the book the boys used to read to teach them English 
was a book about social conditions and domestic life in England, 
described by a German who, I suppose, had been to England. 
He had a singular gift for misunderstanding the simplest and 
most ordinary occurrences and phenomena of English life and 
the English character. 

I suppose it would be true to say that the English did not 
know the Germans any better than the Germans knew them. 
English statesmen, with one exception, certainly knew little 
of Germany, but there is this difference. The English admitted 
their ignorance, their indifference, and passed on. They never 
theorised about the Germans, nor dogmatised. They never 
said: "There is no cheese in Germany," or: "The Germans 
cannot play football." They did not know whether they did 
or not, and cared still less. 

During the Boer War, the German Press voiced with virulence 
all that the middle class in Germany had thought for years, 
and we were astonished at this explosion of violence; but 
in reality this was no new phenomenon ; it was the natural 



OXFORD AND GERMANY 175 

expression of feelings that had existed for long and which 
now found a favourable outlet. 

Of course, in the upper classes, things, for all I know, may 
have been quite different. I know that there were influential 
Germans who always wished for good relations between the 
two countries, but even there they were in a minority. 

I left Germany grateful for many things, extremely fond of 
many of the people I had known, but convinced that there was 
not the slightest chance of popular opinion in Germany ever 
being favourable towards England, as the feeling the Germans 
harboured was one of envy — the envy a clever person feels for 
someone he knows to be more stupid than himself and yet is 
far more successful, and who succeeds without apparent effort, 
where he has laboriously tried and failed. 

Bismarck used to say there was not a German who would 
not be proud to be taken for an Englishman, and when Germans 
felt this to be true it only made them the more angry. 

Years later I heard foreign diplomatists who knew Germany 
well sometimes say that the English alarm and suspicion of 
German hatred of England was baseless, and that the idea that 
Germany was always brooding on a possible war with England 
was unfounded. 

When asked how they accounted for the evidence which 
daily seemed to point to the contrary, they would say they 
knew some German politicians intimately who desired nothing 
so much as good relations with England. This was no doubt 
true, but in speaking like this, these impartial foreigners were 
thinking of certain highly cultured, liberal-minded aristocrats. 
They did not know the German bourgeoisie. Indeed they 
often said, when someone alluded to the violence of German 
newspapers : "That's the Professors." 

It was the Professors. But it was the Professors who wrote 
the history books, who taught the children and the schoolboys, 
lectured to the students, and trained the minds of the future 
politicians and soldiers of Germany. 

During my last sojourn at Hildesheim I went to stay with 
Erich Wippern, who was learning forestry in the Harz Mountains. 
He lived in a little wooden house in the forest. The house was 
furnished entirely with antlers, and from morning till night, he 
associated with trees and was taught all about them by an old 
forester. 



176 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

I never went back to Hildesheim again for any time, 
although I used sometimes to stay a night there on my 
way to or from Russia. The last time I heard of the 
Timmes was just before the outbreak of war, when I 
received a letter from Kurt Timme, whom I had known 
twenty-two years before as a little boy, telling me his 
father was dead, and inviting me to attend his own wed- 
ding. Kurt was an officer, now a lieutenant. I sent him 
a wedding present. Two weeks later we were at war with 
Germany. 

At the end of the summer term, Bron, Kershaw, and myself 
gave a dinner-party at the Mitre, to which forty guests were 
invited. Slap's band officiated. The banquet took place in a 
room upstairs. This was the menu : 

JUNE 1 6, 1897. 

Melon, Two Soups, Salmon, Whitebait, Sweet- 
bread, Bits of Chicken, Lamb, Potatoes, Asparagus, 
Duck, Peas, Salad, Jelly, Ice, Strawberries, 
Round Things. 

The caterers of the dinner were loth to print such a menu. 

They hankered for phrases such as Puree a la bonne femme, 
and Poulets printaniers, but I overruled them. Very soon, 
during dinner, the musical instruments were smashed to bits, 
and towards the end of the meal there was a fine ice-throwing 
competition. After dinner the guests adjourned to Balliol 
Quadrangle. 

It was Jubilee year — the second Jubilee. Preparations 
were being made in London for the procession and for other 
festivities, and the atmosphere was charged with triumph and 
prosperity. For the third time in my life I saw Queen Victoria 
drive through the streets of London. I saw the procession from 
Montagu House in Whitehall. This was the most imposing of 
all the pageants, and the most striking thing about it was perhaps 
the crowd. 

There was a great deal of talk about the Fancy Dress Ball 
at Devonshire House. I had a complicated costume for it, but 
none of my family went to it as our Uncle Johnny died just 
before it came off. We went to see some of the people in their 
clothes at Lord Cowper's house in St. James's Square, where I 
remember a tall and blindingly beautiful Hebe, a dazzling 



OXFORD AND GERMANY 177 

Charlotte Corday, in grey and vermilion, a lady who looked as 
if she had stepped out of an Italian picture, with a long, faded 
Venetian red train and a silver hat tapering into a point, and 
another who had stepped from an old English frame, a pale 
figure in faded draperies and exquisite lace, with a cluster of 
historic and curiously set jewels in her hair, and arms and 
shoulders like those of a sculpture of the finest Greek period. 

Later on in the summer, my father, who had not been 
well for some time, died, and we said good-bye to 37 Charles 
Street, and to Membland after the funeral was over, for ever. 

I went to a crammer's at Bournemouth and spent the 
whole of the winter in London being intensively crammed, and 
all through the Christmas holidays. In the spring there was 
a further examination. 

This time I qualified ip all subjects, and I was given half- 
marks in arithmetic. The gift of these half -marks must have 
been a favour, as, comparing my answers with those of other 
candidates, after the examination, I found that my answers 
in no way coincided with theirs. 

Years later I met a M. Roche, who had been the French 
examiner. He told me that I was not going to be let through ; 
{as I suspected, I had not passed in arithmetic), but that he had 
gone to the Board of Examiners and had told them the French 
essay I had written might have been written by a Frenchman. 
When the result of the examination was announced I was not in 
the first three, but when the first vacancy occurred later, I was 
given it, and on 20th June 1898 I received a letter from the 
Civil Service Commission saying that, owing to an additional 
vacancy having been reported, I had been placed in the 
position of a successful candidate, and asking me to furnish 
evidence of my age. 

I was able to do this, and was admitted into the Foreign 
Office and placed in the African Department. 

I enjoyed my first summer at the Foreign Office before 
the newness of the work and surroundings wore off. The 
African Department was interesting. It has since been taken 
over by the Colonial Office. Officials from West Africa 
would drift in and tell us interesting things, and there was 
in the Department a senior clerk whose devotion to office 
work was such that his leave, on the rare occasions he took 
it, used to consist in his coming down to the office at eleven 
12 



178 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

in the morning instead of at ten. At the end of the summer I 
was moved up into the Commercial Department, which was a 
haven of rest in the Foreign Office, as no registering had to be 
done there, and no putting away of papers ; and the junior 
clerks used to write drafts on commercial matters — tenders 
and automatic couplings. In the other departments they had 
to serve a fifteen-year apprenticeship before being allowed to 
write a draft. 

Suddenly, in that autumn, the whole life of the Office was 
made exciting by the Fashoda crisis. We were actually on the 
brink of a European war. The question which used to be dis- 
cussed from morning till night in the Office was : " Will Lord 
Salisbury climb down ? " The Office thought we always climbed 
down ; that Lord Salisbury was the King of Climbers-down. 
But Lord Salisbury had no intention of climbing down this 
time, and did not do so. I remember my Uncle Cromer saying 
one day, when someone attacked what he called Lord Salis- 
bury's vacillating and weak policy : " Lord Salisbury knows his 
Europe ; he has an eye on what is going on in all the countries 
and on our interests all over the world, and not only on one 
small part of the world." During this crisis, the tension 
between France and England was extreme ; it was made worse 
by the inflammatory speeches that irresponsible members of 
Parliament made all over England at the time. I believe 
they shared the Foreign Office view that Lord Salisbury would 
climb down at the end, and were trying to burn his boats for 
him ; but they need not have troubled, and their speeches did 
far more harm than good. They had no effect on the policy 
of the Foreign Office, which was clearly settled in Lord 
Salisbury's mind ; all they did was to exasperate the French, 
and to make matters more difficult for the Government. 
This was the first experience of what seems to me to recur 
whenever England is in difficulties. Directly a crisis arises 
in which England is involved, dozens of irresponsible people, 
and sometimes even responsible people, set about to make 
matters far more difficult than they need be. This was especi- 
ally true during the European War. I never saw Lord Salis- 
bury in person during the time I spent in the Foreign Office, 
except at a garden-party at Hatfield, where I was one of several 
hundreds whom he shook hands with. But I had often the 
opportunity of reading his minutes, and sometimes his reports. 



OXFORD AND GERMANY 179 

written in his own handwriting, of conversations he had held 
with Foreign Ambassadors. These were always amusing and 
caustic, and his comments were wise and far sighted. 

The internal arrangements and organisation of the Office 
were in the hands of Lord Sanderson. Many of the clerks 
lived in terror of him. He was extremely kind to me, although 
he always told me I should never be a good clerk and would 
do better to stick to diplomacy. Even on the printed forms 
we used to fill up, enclosing communications, which we called 
P.L.'s, and which he used to sign himself, in person, every 
evening, a clerk standing beside him with a slip of blotting-paper, 
his minute eye for detail used constantly to discern a slight 
inaccuracy, either in the mode of address or the terminology. 
He would then take a scraper and scratch it out and amend it. 
The signing of all these forms must have used a great deal of 
his time, and I believe the custom has now been abolished. 

In those days all dispatches were kept folded in the Office, 
an immensely inconvenient practice. All the other public 
offices kept them flat, but when it was suggested that the 
Foreign Office papers should be kept flat, there was a storm of 
opposition. They had been kept folded for a hundred years ; 
the change was unthinkable. Someone suggested a compromise : 
that they should be half-folded and kept curved, but this was 
abandoned. Ultimately, I believe, they were allowed to be 
kept flat. 

Later on, the whole work of the Foreign Office was re- 
formed, and the clerks no longer have to spend half the day 
in doing manual clerical work. In my time it was most ex- 
hausting, except in the Commercial Department, which was 
a haven of gentlemanlike ease. Telegrams had often to be 
ciphered and deciphered by the clerk, but not often in the 
Commercial Department. But on one Saturday afternoon 
I remember having to send off two telegrams, one to Sweden 
and one to Constantinople, and I sent the Swedish telegram 
to Constantinople and the Turkish telegram to Sweden, and 
nothing could be done to remedy the mistake till Monday, as 
nobody noticed it till it was too late, and the clerks went away 
on Saturday afternoon. Sending off the bags was always a 
moment of fuss, anxiety, and strain. Someone nearly always 
out of excitement used to drop the sealing-wax on the hand 
of the clerk who was holding the bag, and sometimes the bag 



180 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

used to be sent to the wrong place. One day both Lord Sander- 
son and Sir Frank Bertie came into one of the departments 
to make sure the bag should go to the right place. The 
excess of cooks had a fatal result on the broth, and the bag, 
which was destined for some not remote spot, was sent to 
Guatemala by mistake, whence it could not be retrieved for 
several months. 

After Christmas that year I stayed with the Cornishes at the 
Cloisters at Eton, and we acted a play called Sylvie and Bruno, 
adapted from Lewis Carroll's book. The Cornish children and 
the Ritchies took part in it. I played the part of the Other 
Professor, and one act was taken up by his giving a lecture. 
The play was successful, and Donald Tovey wrote some music 
for it and accompanied the singers at the pianoforte. 

In January I was appointed attache to the Embassy at 
Paris, and I began my career as a diplomat. 



CHAPTER X 
PARIS 

I HAD rooms at the Embassy, a bedroom above the 
Chancery, and a little sitting-room on the same floor 
as the Chancery. The Ambassador was Sir Edmund 
Monson ; the Councillor, Michael Herbert ; the head of the 
Chancery, Reggie Lister. Both of these had rooms to them- 
selves where they worked. The other secretaries worked in 
the Chancery. 

In the morning, the bag used to arrive from the Foreign 
Office. It used to be fetched from Calais every night, and twice 
a week a King's Messenger would bring it. The business of 
the day began by the bag being opened, and the contents were 
entered in a register and then sent to the Ambassador. The 
dispatches were then sent back to the Chancery in red 
boxes to be dealt with, and were finally folded up and put 
away in a cupboard. Later on in the day, a box used 
to come down from the Ambassador with draft dispatches, 
which were written out by us on typewriters, if we could, or 
with a pen. 

Work at the Embassy meant writing out dispatches on a 
typewriter, registering dispatches and putting them away, or 
ciphering and deciphering telegrams. That was the important 
part of the work. It was for that one had to hang about in case 
it might happen, and it was liable to happen at any moment of 
the day, or the night. 

Besides this, there was a perpetual stream of minor occur- 
rences which came into the day's work. People of all nation- 
alities used to call at the Embassy and have to be interviewed 
by someone. A lady would arrive and say she would like to 
paint a miniature of Queen Victoria ; a soldier would arrive 
from India who thought he had been bitten by a mad dog, and 
ask to see Pasteur ; a man would call who was the only legitimate 



182 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

King of France, Henry v., with his title and dynasty printed 
on his visiting card, and ask for the intervention of the British 
Government ; or someone would come to say that he had 
found the real solution of the Irish problem, or the Eastern 
question ; or a way of introducing conscription into England 
without incurring any expense and without English people 
being aware of it. Besides this, British subjects of every kind 
would come and ask for facilities to see Museums, to write 
books, to learn how to cure snake bites, to paddle in canoes on 
the Oise or the Loire, to take their pet dogs back to England 
without muzzles (this was always refused), or to take a book 
from the Bibliotheque Nationale, or a missal from some remote 
Museum. All these people had to be interviewed and their 
requests, if reasonable, had to be forwarded to the French 
Government, for which there were special stereotyped formulae. 
Drafts had to be written for notes to the French Govern- 
ment, and there was a large correspondence with the various 
Consulates. 

In the morning, the head of the Chancery used to interview 
the Ambassador and report to the Chancery on the state of his 
temper ; sometimes he would go and see a French Minister 
and come back laden with news and gossip ; various secre- 
taries, the naval and military attaches, or the King's Messenger, 
would stroll into the Chancery, and discuss the latest news, 
and sometimes other visitors from England would waste our 
time. 

The Ambassador never appeared in person in the Chancery, 
and his displeasure with the staff, when it was incurred, used 
to be conveyed to them in memoranda, written in red ink, which 
were sent to them in a red leather dispatch box. 

Sir Edmund Monson had the pen of a ready dispatch- 
writer, and he would write very long and beautifully expressed 
dispatches. 

We used to have luncheon generally at the same restaurant, 
and be free in the afternoons, although we had to come back 
towards tea-time to see if there was anything to do and often 
remain in the Chancery till nearly eight o'clock ; one resident 
clerk had to live in the house in case there were telegrams at 
night. If there was a lot of telegraphing, the work would be 
heavy. 

The Chancery hours were always gay. One day one of the 



PARIS 183 

third secretaries and myself had an argument, and I threw the 
contents of the inkpot at him. He threw the contents of 
another inkpot back at me. The interchange of ink then 
became intensive, and went as far as red ink. All the inkpots 
of the Chancery were emptied, and the other secretaries ducked 
their heads while the grenades of ink whizzed past their heads. 
The fight went on till all the ink in the Chancery was used up. 
My sitting-room was then drawn on, and the fight went on 
down the Chancery stairs, into the street, and I had a final 
shot from my sitting-room window, the ink pouring down the 
walls. 

We were drenched with ink, red and black, but still more 
so was the Chancery carpet, the staircase, and the walls of 
the Rue Faubourg St. Honore. Reggie Lister was told 
what had happened, and said : " Really, those boys are too 
tiresome." 

We were alarmed at the state of the carpet, a handsome red 
densely thick pile. We bought some chemicals from the 
chemist and tried to wash it out, spending hours in the 
effort after dinner. The only result was that the corrosive 
acids burnt the carpet away, which made the damage much 
worse. 

The next morning Herbert arrived at the Embassy and 
noticed that the Chancery staircase was splashed with black 
stains. He asked the reason and was told. We were sent for. 
In quiet, acid, biting tones he told us we were nothing better 
than dirty little schoolboys, and we went away with our tails 
between our legs. But all that was nothing ; Reggie's plaintive 
remonstration and Herbert's biting censure left us calm ; what 
we were really frightened of was the Ambassador — would he 
find it out ? 

The next three days were days of dark apprehension, over- 
clouded with the shadow of a possible ink-row ; especially as 
the stain caused by the acids on the Chancery carpet had turned 
it grey and white, and left a dreadful cavity in the middle of the 
stain. We ordered a new carpet and prayed that the Am- 
bassador might not be led by an evil mischance to visit the 
Chancery. He did not, and the episode passed off unnoticed 
by him. 

Our relations with France at this time were not of the best. 
The Fashoda incident was just over ; the Boer War was going 



184 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

on, which the French said was : " Une guerre d'affaires " ; a 
speech had been made recently by Sir E. Monson at the banquet 
of the Chamber of Commerce which had made a great sensa- 
tion. The majority of the French Cabinet were in favour of 
asking that the British Government be asked to recall Sir E. 
Monson, but M. Delcasse was strongly opposed to this as he 
feared war. In spite of all this, the French were friendly to 
us personally. I was elected to the " Cercle de l'Union " and 
seconded by General Gallifet. 

The French were absorbed in the Dreyfus case. Nothing 
else was discussed from morning till night. Wherever one 
went one heard echoes of this discussion, and in whatever circle 
or group you heard the problem discussed the disputants were 
generally divided in a proportion of five to three ; three be- 
lieving in the innocence of Dreyfus, and five believing in his 
guilt. 

One night I dined with Edouard Rod and Brewster. The 
burning topic engrossed us to such an extent, we discussed it so 
long and so keenly that I still remember the only other subjects 
we mentioned ; they stood out, isolated and rare, like oases 
in the vast Dreyfus desert. I remember Rod saying he didn't 
care for Verlaine's poetry, because it wasn't banal enough. 
Brewster and I quoted some lines ; but Rod thought them all 
too subtle and not direct enough. Finally I quoted : 

" Triste, triste etait mon ame, 
A cause, a cause d'une femme." 

This he passed. 

We discussed plays for a brief moment. Rod said he 
liked bad plays played by good actors — for instance, Duse in 
La Dame aux Camillas ; Brewster said he liked good plays 
done by bad actors — Musset played by refined amateurs ; I 
said I liked good plays acted by good actors. Then we talked 
of Dreyfus once more, and Rod said plaintively : "De quoi est- 
ce-qu'on pari era lorsque 1 'affaire sera finie ? " 

I made acquaintance of Anatole France and attended some 
of his Sunday morning levees at the Villa Said in the Bois de 
Boulogne. 

When I first went there, I never heard any topic except 
L'affaire mentioned, and indeed the only people present at 
these meetings were fanatical partisans of Dreyfus who did not 



PARIS 185 

wish to talk of anything else. In other houses I met equally 
fanatical believers in Dreyfus' guilt. While one was sitting 
at a quiet tea, an excited academician would rush in and say : 
" Savez-vous ce qu'ils ont fait ? Savez-vous ce qu'ils osent 
dire ? " I find this entry in my notebook dated 5th July 1899, 
from Boswell : 

" Talking of a court-martial that was sitting upon a very 
momentous public occasion, he (Dr. Johnson) expressed much 
doubt of an enlightened decision ; and said that perhaps there 
was not a member of it who in the whole course of his life had 
ever spent an hour by himself in balancing probabilities." 

On the other hand, I remember someone saying at the time 
that although the decisions of court-martials were nearly 
always wrong, technically, in their form, they were nearly 
always right in substance. 

Most English people whom I saw during this period believed 
in Dreyfus' innocence, but not all. Among the fervent believers 
in his guilt was Arthur Strong, then librarian in the House of 
Lords. 

I had made Arthur Strong's acquaintance at Edmund 
Gosse's house, and he was from that moment kind to me. 
In appearance he was like pictures of Erasmus (not that I 
have ever seen one !) — the perfect incarnation of a scholar. He 
knew and understood everything, but forgave little. And the 
smoke from the flame of his learning and his intellect some- 
times got into people's eyes. I frequently saw him in London, 
and once he came to see me in Paris. I remember his looking 
at the bookshelf and the pictures on my walls, photographs of 
pictures by Giorgone and Titian. 

He approved of Dyce's Shakespeare ; Dyce's, he said, was 
a good edition. He disapproved of Stevenson ; Stevenson, he 
said, had fancy but no imagination. Giorgone, he said, was to 
Titian what Marcello was to Gluck. Talking of the Dreyfus 
case, he said if English people would only understand that the 
Dreyfusards are the same as pro-Boers in England they would 
talk differently. He said the French were supreme critics of 
verse. They were like the Persians, they stood no nonsense 
about poetry. To them it was either good or bad verse. 
He used to say that there had never been since Johnson's 
Lives of the Poets a critical review of English literature as 



186 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

big and as broad. We might find fault with some of 
Dr. Johnson's judgments, but there had been nothing to 
replace it. 

He admired Byron as much as my father did, and in the 
same way. He thought him a towering genius. Shelley like- 
wise, but not Wordsworth. Wordsworth, he said, was like 
Taine and Wagner. They were all three just on the wrong 
lines, each one of them on a tremendous scale, but wrong 
nevertheless. 

We used to have fierce arguments about Wagner. Wagner's 
work, he used to say, was not dramatic but scenic. He in- 
vented a vastly effective situation but left it at that ; neither 
the action nor the music moved on. He thought Mozart was 
infinitely more dramatic. He said that Wagner could not 
write a melody, and that if he did, with the exception of the 
Preislied in the Meister singer, it was commonplace and vulgar. 
The " Leit-Motivs " were not complete melodies. 

I was at that time a fervent Wagnerite, and used to contest 
his points hotly. Curiously enough, six years later, his ideas 
on Wagner found an echo in a letter which I received from 
Vernon Lee, after she had been to Bayreuth. This is what 
she wrote : 

" About Bayreuth. Although I expected little enjoyment, 
I have been miserably disappointed. It is so much less out 
of the common than I expected. Just a theatre like any other, 
save for the light being turned out entirely instead of half-cock 
only, and the only beautiful things an opera ever offers to the 
eye, namely the fiddles, great and small, and the enchanting 
kettle-drums, being stuffed out of sight. The mise en scene is 
more grotesquely bad than almost any other opera get-up. 
What is insufferable to me is the atrocious way in which Wagner 
takes himself seriously : the self-complacent (if I may coin an 
absurd expression) auto-religion implied in his hateful unbridled 
long-windedness and reiteration ; the element of degenerate 
priesthood in it all, like English people contemplating their 
hat linings in Church, their prudery about the name of God. . . . 
Surely all great art of every sort has a certain coyness which 
makes it give itself always less than wanted : look at Mozart, 
he will give you a whole act of varying dramatic expression 
(think of the first act of Don Giovanni) of deepest, briefest 
pathos and swift humour, a dozen perfect songs or concerted 
pieces, in the time it takes for that old poseur, Amfortas, to 
squirm over his Grail, or Kundry to break the ice with Parsifal. 



PARIS 187 

Even Tristan, so incomparably finer than Wagner's other 
things, is indecent through its dragging out of situations, its 
bellowing out of confessions which the natural human being 
dreads to profane by showing or expressing. With all this goes 
what to me is the chief psychological explanation of Wagner 
(and of his hypnotic power over some persons), his extreme 
slowness of vital tempo. Listening to him is like finding oneself 
in a planet where the Time's unit is bigger than ours : one is on 
the stretch, devitalised as by the contemplation of a slug. Do 
you know who has the same peculiarity ? D'Annunzio. And 
it is this which makes his literature, like Wagner's music, so 
undramatic, so sensual, so inhuman, turn everything into a 
process of gloating. I had the good fortune (like Nietzsche) of 
hearing Carmen just after the Ring. The humanity of it, and 
the modesty also, are due very much to the incomparable 
briskness of the rhythm and phrasing ; the mind is made to 
work quickly, the life of the hearer to brace itself to action." 

I think Arthur Strong would have agreed with every word 
of this. 

I had not been at Paris long before one evening after dinner 
the telephone bell rang ; I went to answer it and was told that 
President Faure was dead. The staff of the Embassy walked 
in the funeral procession to Notre Dame, in uniform. It was 
a radiant day, the mourning decorations — a veil of crape flung 
negligently across the facade of the Chamber of Deputies — the 
banners, the wreaths, the draperies, were a fine example of the 
French discretion and artistic instinct in decoration. On the 
balcony of the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, Sarah Bernhardt was 
sitting wrapped in furs ; with us were the Corps Diplomatique, 
some officials from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs ; one 
a composer of dance tunes, Sourires d'Avril, etc., once cele- 
brated all over Europe, now more forgotten than the songs of 
Nineveh or Tyre. We laughed, we chattered, we ate chocolate, 
we enjoyed the sunshine and the exercise, we gave no thought 
to the man in the gorgeous coffin who had taken so much trouble 
to ape and observe the forms of majesty, and who had been 
rewarded with such merciless ridicule. 

During the first fortnight I spent in the Diplomatic Service 
there was a plethora of funerals which we had to attend ; one 
at the Greek Church ; one at the Madeleine. Attending 
funerals, and going to the station to meet royalties were both 
important factors in Diplomatic life. Indeed, at a small post 



188 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

one seemed to spend half one's life at the railway station. Some 
of the secretaries were keen race-goers, and when, as sometimes 
happened, they were not allowed to go because of possible work, 
and they would point out that there was not likely to be any 
work to do, Reggie Lister used wisely to remark that we were 
not paid for the amount of work we did, but for hanging about 
in case there should be any work. In spite of this, he used 
generally to arrange things in such a manner that anyone who 
wanted to go to the races could go. 

Reggie Lister was an artist in life and the organisation of 
life. He built his arrangements and those of others with a light 
scaffolding that could be taken down at a moment's notice and 
rearranged if necessary in a different manner to suit a change of 
circumstance. He was radiantly sensible. He had a horror 
of the trashy and the affected, and his gaiety was buoyant, 
boyish, and infectious. If he was really amused himself, his 
face used to crinkle and his body shake like a jelly, " comme un 
gros bebe," as a Frenchman once said. His intuition was like 
second-sight and his tact always at work but never obtrusive, 
like the works of a delicate watch. I never saw anyone either 
before or after who could make such a difference to his sur- 
roundings and to the company he was with. He made every- 
thing effervesce. You could not say how he did it. It was not 
because of any exceptional brilliance or any unusual wit, or 
arresting ideas ; but over and over again I have seen him do 
what people more brilliant than himself could not do to save 
their lives, that is, transfigure a dull company and change a 
grey atmosphere into a golden one. It was not only that 
he could never bore anyone himself, but that nobody was ever 
bored when he was there. You laughed with him, not at him. 
He took his enjoyment with him wherever he went and he 
made others share it. 

His taste was fastidious, but catholic, and above all 
things sensible. He was acutely appreciative of external 
things : a walk down the Champs Elysees on a fine spring morn- 
ing ; good cooking ; dancing and skating, and he danced 
like mad ; he was never tired of telling one of his summer 
travels in Greece ; his first disappointment and his subsequent 
delight in Constantinople — and nobody in the world could 
tell such things as well. It was difficult to be more intelli- 
gent ; but his intelligence (and after a minute's conversation 



PARIS 189 

with him you could not but be aware of its acuteness), his love 
and knowledge of artistic things, his shrewdness, his humour, 
and rollicking fun, although taken all together, are still not 
enough to account for the fascination that his personality 
exercised over so many different people — over, I believe, almost 
anyone he pleased, if he took the trouble. If his diplomatic 
duties called for trouble of this kind, there was none he would 
not take ; if only his own private social life was concerned he 
sometimes permitted himself the luxury of indifference ; but 
he never indulged in " le plaisir aristocratique de deplaire " ; 
although the company of celebrities tried him almost beyond 
endurance, leaving a peevish aftermath for his friends to put 
up with. 

One instance is better than pages of explanation and 
analysis. 

One day Reggie Lister and myself each received a letter 
from a friend in England asking us to be civil to a young French 
couple who were newly married, and were just setting up house 
in Paris. Reggie left cards on them, and they asked us both to 
luncheon. 

We found them in a small but extremely clean apartment on 
the other side of the river, and as we went into the drawing- 
room it seemed to be crowded with relations in black — mothers- 
in-law and sisters-in-law, and aunts. All of them in deep 
mourning. It reminded me of the opening scene of a one-act 
play, which used to be popular many years ago, called La joie 
fait peur. In that play, the curtain rises on a bereaved family 
who are all of them steeped in inspissated gloom. 

We went into the little dining-room and sat down to a 
shiny mahogany table. An old servant tottered and pottered 
about the room with a bunch of keys and a bottle of wine 
covered with cobwebs. A rather grim mother-in-law sat at 
the head of the table. The young, newly married couple were 
shy. There was an atmosphere of stern, rigid propriety and 
inflexible tradition over the whole proceeding. Formal phrases 
were bandied, and all the time the mother-in-law, the aunts, 
and the sisters-in-law, all of them dressed in crape with neat 
white frills, never ceased to throw on the bashful young 
couple the full searchlight of their critical observation. But 
we had not been at the table many minutes before Reggie had 
captivated the company, and at the end of five minutes they 



igo THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

were all screaming with laughter and talking at the top of their 
voices. They were not laughing at him. They were laughing 
with him. 

This is just what Reggie Lister could do, and what I have 
never seen anybody else succeed in doing, to that extent and in 
such difficult circumstances. He had something which made 
you, whoever was in the room, wish to listen to him, and 
made you wish him to listen to you. He had also the gift 
of making the witty wittier, the singer, the talker, the 
musician, the reciter, do better than his best, of drawing 
out the best of other people by his instantly responsive 
appreciation. 

The French of all classes appreciated and loved him, and 
when he died they felt as if an essential part of Paris had been 
taken away, and a part that nothing could replace. To be 
with him at the same Embassy, as I was for a year and a half, 
was an education in all that makes life worth living. But 
what was life to me was, I am afraid, sometimes death to him, 
as I tried him at times highly. 

The Ambassador, Sir Edmund Monson, was academic with 
a large swaying presence and an inexhaustible supply of polished 
periods. A fine scholar and a master of precise and well- 
expressed English and an undiminishing store of vivid re- 
miniscence ; in the matter of penmanship he was passion's 
slave. Possibly my opinion is biased from having had to 
write out so many of his dispatches on a typewriter, and so 
often some of them twice, owing to the mistakes. Type- 
writing, it is well known, is an art in which improvement is 
rarely achieved by the amateur ; one reaches a certain degree 
of speed and inaccuracy, and after that, no amount of practice 
makes one any better. If there were too many mistakes in a 
dispatch it would have to be written out again. There never 
seemed to be any reason why Sir Edmund's dispatches should 
ever end, and they were just as remarkable for quantity as 
for length. He was exceedingly kind and always amiable, 
to talk to or rather to listen to ; he was the same in his dis- 
patches ; one had the sensation of coasting pleasantly down- 
hill on a bicycle that had no break, and save for an accident 
was not likely to stop. 

Michael Herbert, the Councillor, was a complete contrast to 
Sir Edmund in many ways. With him one felt not only the 



PARIS 191 

presence of a brake, but of steel-like grasp on that brake — a 
steel-like grasp concealed by the sua vest of gloves and a high, 
refined courtesy and the appearance of a cavalier strayed by 
mistake into the modern world. Never was there an appearance 
more deceptive in some ways ; in so far, that is to say, as it 
seemed to indicate apathy or indifference or lack of fibre. He 
had a will of iron and a fearless and instant readiness to shoulder 
any responsibility, however grave or perplexing. He was a 
man of action, and an ideal diplomat. At one of his posts 
they called him "the butcher." At that time the men who 
enjoyed the highest reputation in the Diplomatic Service, and 
who seemed to be the most promising, were perhaps Charles 
Elliot, Cecil Spring-Rice, and Arthur Hardinge ; and in every 
one of these cases the promise was fulfilled ; but as a diplomat, 
I think anyone would agree, that Herbert excelled them all 
and easily, although the others might be in one case more in- 
tellectual or more brilliant, in another more erudite. Herbert 
had a steely strength of purpose, a quick eye, and the power 
of making up his mind at once, as well as a shrewd under- 
standing of the world and especially of the foreign world, and a 
quiet far-sightedness. Moreover, he had the charm that arises 
from natural and native distinction, and a subtle flavour which 
came from his being intensely English, and at the same time 
a citizen of the v/orld, without any admixture of artificial 
cosmopolitanism. He would have been at home in any period 
of English history ; whether at the Black Prince's Court at 
Bordeaux, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, at Kenilworth, at 
Whitehall, or at the Congress of Vienna. 

Had he dressed himself up in the shimmering and sombre 
satins and the waving plumes of the Vandyk period they would 
have seemed to be his natural, his everyday clothes. 

I could imagine him putting his inflexible determination, 
expressed in thin, metallic tones of deferential and courteous 
deprecation, lit up by gleams of a sharp and shy humour, 
against the perhaps equally obstinate, but unfortunately less 
wise and less constant, wishes of Charles 1. I can imagine 
him, with his pale face and slight stoop, listening with quiet 
appreciation to the jokes of Falstaff, at the first performance 
of Henry IV. ; or signing, without a flicker of hesitation, a 
dispatch to Drake or Raleigh that would mean war with Spain ; 
or shutting his snuff-box with a sharp snap, as he saw through 



ig2 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

some subtle wile of Talleyrand ; or listening, civil but quite 
unabashed, to a storm of invective from Napoleon. 

One day someone in the Chancery remarked on the peculiarly 
nauseous odour of the food that is given to foxhounds. " I 
like it," he said. " I used to eat it as a child." 

I have always thought the most crucial test to which a new 
piece of verse or a modern picture can be put is to imagine 
what effect the verse would produce in an anthology of 
another epoch or the picture in a gallery of old masters. 
Herbert as a personality and as a diplomatist could have stood 
any test of this kind, and placed next to any of the old masters 
or the old masterpieces, in character and statesmanship, 
without suffering from the comparison ; indeed, so far from 
suffering any eclipse, his personality would only have 
emerged more signally and more distinctly, with the melan- 
choly suavity of its form and the unyielding resilience of its 
substance. 

In April 1899, the second centenary of the death of Racine 
was celebrated in Paris by a performance of Racine's Berenice 
at the Theatre francais. This performance was one of the 
landmarks in my literary adventures. Bartet played Berenice, 
and I do not suppose that Racine's verse can ever have been 
more sensitively rendered and more delicately differentiated. 
Between the acts, M. Du Lau, a fine connoisseur of life and art, 
took me behind the scenes and introduced me to Bartet. They 
talked of the play. Around us hovered an admiring crowd, 
and whispered homages were flung to the artist, like flowers. 
It was like a scene in a Henry James novel, a page from the 
Tragic Muse. They agreed that Racine's loveliest verses were 
in this play : " Des vers si nuances," as Du Lau said. Bartet 
wore a lilac cloak over white draperies, and a high ivory diadem, 
and when we said good-bye Du Lau kissed her hand and said : 
" Bon soir, charmante Berenice." 

If anyone is inclined to think Racine is a tedious author 
they cannot do better than read Berenice. It is the model 
of what a tragedy should be. The drama is simple and 
arises naturally and inevitably from the facts of the case, which 
are all contained in one sentence of Suetonius : " Titus Reginam 
Berenicen, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur, statim ab 
urbe dimisit invitus invitam." That is to say, Titus loved 
Berenice and, it was believed, had promised her marriage. He 



PARIS 193 

sent her away from Rome, against his own will as well as against 
hers, as soon as he came to the throne. 

It is the eternal conflict between public duty and personal 
inclination. 

" With all my will, but much against my heart, 
My very dear, 
We part. 

The solace is the sad road lies so clear ; 
Go thou to East, 
I West." 

Coventry Patmore's Ode sums up the whole tragedy. The 
sentiments the characters express are what any characters 
would have said in such a situation now or a thousand years 
ago, and would be just as appropriate and true if the protagonists 
of the drama belonged to Belgravia or to the Mile End Road. 
The verse is exquisite. 

Antiochus, who loved Berenice in vain, says to her as he 
leaves her : 

" Que vous dirai-je enfin ? je fuis des yeux distraits, 
Qui me voyant toujours ne me voyaient jamais." 

The tragedy is full of musical lines, sad and suggestive and 
softly reverberating, with muted endings such as : 

" Dans l'Orient desert quel devint mon ennui ? 
Je demeurai longtemps errant dans Cesaree, 
Lieux charmants, ou mon cceur vous avait adoree," 

and some of the most poignant words of farewell ever uttered : 

" Pour jamais ! Ah Seigneur ! songez-vous en vous-meme 
Combien ce mot cruel est affreux quand on aime ? 
Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffr irons nous, 
Seigneur, que tant de mers me separent de vous ? 
Que le jour recommence et que le jour finisse, 
Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Berenice." 

The Prince of Wales passed through Paris and stayed there 
a night that winter and dined at the Embassy, and we had to 
wear special coats and be careful they had the right number of 
buttons on them. 

I got to know a good many French people, and some of those 

who had been famous in the days of the Second Empire : Madame 

de Gallifet and Madame de Pourtales. Madame de Pourtales 

had grey hair, but time, which had taken away much from her 

T 3 



194 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

and stamped her with his pitiless seal, had not taken, and was 
destined never to take, away the undefmable authority that 
alone great beauty possesses, and never loses, nor her radiant 
smile, which would suddenly make her look young. 

Once at a party at Paris many years after this, at the 
Jaucourts' house, I again saw Madame de Pourtales. It was 
not long before she died. Her hair was, or seemed to be, quite* 
white, and that evening the room was rather dim and lit from 
the ceiling ; her face was powdered and she appeared quite 
transfigured ; the whiteness of her hair and the effect of the 
light made her face look quite young. You were conscious only 
of dazzling shoulders, a peerless skin, soft shining eyes, and a 
magical smile. She put out everyone else in a room. She 
looked like the photographs of herself taken when she was 
a young woman. One saw what she must have been, and 
everybody who was there agreed that here was an instance of 
the undefmable, undying persistence of great beauty that just 
when you think it is dead, suddenly blooms afresh and gives 
you -a glimpse of its own past. 

Reggie Lister told me that he had once asked Madame de 
Pourtales what was the greatest compliment that had ever been 
paid her. She said it was this. Once in summer she had been 
going out to dinner in Paris. It was rather late in the summer, 
and a breathless evening, she was sitting in her open carriage, 
dressed for dinner, waiting for someone in the clear daylight." 
It was so hot she had only a tulle veil round her shoulders. 
While she was waiting a workman passed the carriage, and 
when he saw her he stood and gaped in silence ; at last he said : 
" Christi ! que tu es belle ! " 

I had already written some short parodies of four French 
authors which I wished to get published. A friend of mine 
sent them to Henri de Regnier and asked his advice. His 
opinion was extremely favourable. He said, and I quote his 
words, so that he may bear the responsibility for my publishing 
such a thing in Paris : " J'ai lu les amusants pastiches de M. 
Baring. Bourget, Renan, Loti ou France pourraient avoir 
ecrit chacun des pages qui soient moins eux." " II faut pour 
avoir fait cela une science bien delicate de la langue francaise. 
Conseillez done a Monsieur Baring de faire imprimer une petite 
plaquette. Elle representerait a elle seule de gros livres, ce qui 
sera delicieux." I sent the parodies to Lemerre and he accepted 



PARIS 195 

them, and they' were published in Paris by his "firm. The 
pamphlet was called Hildesheim, and the small edition was soon 
sold out. The little book was well received by the French, and 
I got a good deal of fun out of it. 

Another literary adventure I had at this time was a corre- 
spondence I started in the Saturday Review. Max Beerbohm, 
in an article on a French translation of Hamlet, said something 
about the French language being lacking in suggestiveness and 

1 mystery. I wrote a letter saying that the French language was 
as suggestive to a Frenchman as the English language was to an 
Englishman, upon which a professor wrote to say that the French 
language was only a bastard language, and that when a French- 
man wrote of a girl as being beaucoup belle he was talking pidgin- 
Latin. Many people then wrote to point out that the professor 
was talking pidgin-French, and a certain H. B. joined in the fray, 
quoting the " Chanson de Roland," and saying that an English- 
man who used the phrase beaucoup belle in France would be 
treated with the courtesy due to strangers, but a Frenchman 
would be preparing for himself an unhappy manhood and a 
friendless old age. It was a terrible comment, he added, on 
the modern system of primary education. The controversy 
then, as nearly always happens, wandered into the channel of 
a side-issue, where it went on merrily bubbling for several 
weeks. 

English people used to stream through Paris all the year 
round. One was constantly asked out to dinner, both by them 
and by the French. One night I dined with Admiral Maxe, and 
the other guest was M. Clemenceau. M. Clemenceau was in those 
days conducting a violent campaign for Dreyfus in the Press, 
and was a thorn in the flesh of the Government. I was severely 
reproved for dining with him the next day. I knew a few 
Frenchmen of letters : M. Henri de Regnier, Melchior de Vogue, 

, Andre Chevrillon, Edouard Rod, Madame Darmsteter. 

I remember at one of Anatole France's receptions (I only 
attended Very few, as in those days a foreigner felt uncomfort- 
able in circles where the Dreyfus case was being discussed — it 
was too much of a family affair) Anatole France talked of 
^Eschylus. He said the texts we possess of ^Eschylus are 

'shortened, abbreviated forms of the plays, almost, speaking 
with exaggeration, like the libretto of an opera founded on a 
well-known drama, almost as if we only possessed an operatic 



196 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

libretto of Hamlet or Faust, but he added : " Pourtant ceux qui 
ont admire Aschyle ne sont point des imbeciles." 

But literature was rarely discussed anywhere in those days, 
as L'affaire dominated everything and excluded all other 
topics. 

In August came the Rennes trial, and the excitement reached 
its climax. Gallifet was minister of war, and I heard him make 
his first speech in the Chamber. " Assassin ! " shouted the 
left. " C'est moi, Messieurs," said Gallifet, and waited till they 
had finished. During the month of August, he used to dine 
every night at the"Cercle de 1' Union." The club was quite 
deserted. I used often to sit at his table. 

He told me that many people in the Club would probably 
not speak to him when they returned, for his having accepted 
the portfolio at such a time. " They will turn their backs on me 
probably," he said. "Mais," he added, with a chuckle, " ils 
ne se permetteront pas une impertinence." He used to tell 
me many interesting things. He said the most beautiful 
woman he had ever seen in his life was Georgiana, Lady Dudley, 
at one of the early Paris Exhibitions, and after her, Madame 
de Castiglione. I never knew whether he had believed in the 
guilt or innocence of Dreyfus, but I knew he was determined the 
case should end somehow and by a verdict which should bring 
about an apaisement. 

The General was a picturesque and striking figure, not tall 
nor imposing, but carved, as it were, in some enduring granite- 
like substance, with steely eyes, a quick, rather hoarse, jerky 
utterance, and a very direct manner, a little alarming to a new- 
comer, owing to its abrupt frankness, and his way of saying 
what he thought in the most pointed, Gallic manner. His 
illustrations, too, and his confessions were sometimes startling. 

In conversation he leapt over all conventions, with the same 
gaiety and gallantry that had made him say at Sedan : " Tant 
que vous voudrez, Mon General." In the early days of the 
case he had been strongly in favour of revision. 

When the verdict of the Court of Rennes was announced, 
and Dreyfus subsequently pardoned, a curious thing happened. 
Although the topic had been raging daily for years to the 
exclusion of everything else, exciting everywhere the fiercest 
passions, and dividing every family in France, estranging friend- 
ships, and breaking careers, the very moment the decision 



PARIS 197 

was made known, the topic dropped from the minds of men 
instantly and finally, as though it had never existed. 

My own point of view, which I sometimes found was shared 
by others, was that I believed Dreyfus to be innocent, but I 
loathed the Dreyfusards. Commenting on this, Andrew Lang 
wrote to me : " People like us, who hate vivisection and anti- 
vivisectionists, who believe Dreyfus was innocent and loathe 
Dreyfusards (though anti-Dreyfusards were really worse), have 
no business on this foolish planet." 

I often went to the play, and the chief enjoyment I derived 
was from what Sarah Bernhardt did in those days, about most 
of which I shall deal with separately. She must have a chapter 
to herself. Of the rest I remember but little except a revival 
of La Belle Helene with its enchanting tunes, and some funny 
songs at Montmartre ; Rejane in Zaza and La Robe Rouge, 
and a terrifying play at the Theatre Antoine called En Paix, 
about a man who is shut up in a lunatic asylum, when he is 
sane, and who ends by going mad. This play was said not only 
to have been founded on fact, but to have been written by a 
man whose brother had been shut up in a private lunatic 
asylum by some conspiring greedy relations. 

The man whose brother was thus treated went to Law, but 
without avail, so as a last resource he wrote a play in which 
he exposed the facts, which were briefly these : A greedy family 
wish to get one of their members out of the way. They say 
he is mad and get him sequestered in a mad-house. He has a 
just brother who tries to get him released, but the brother finds 
himself faced with the obstinacy of professionalism when he 
declares the sequestered man is not mad ; the lunatic experts 
say he does not understand the intricacies of the disease, and 
when he loses his temper, the doctors say: "You, too, are 
showing signs of the family madness." The man who is shut 
up is quick tempered ; a sojourn with lunatics sharpens his 
temper, and the play ends by his being dragged out by sinister- 
looking warders, crying out : "A la douche ! " I could 
not sleep after seeing this spectacle, which lost nothing 
in the realistic interpretation of actors such as Antoine and 
Gemier. 

In September, I went for a short time on^leave, and stayed 
at Lynton, North Devon, with the Cornishes in a delightful 
little house called the Chough's Nest. It was a warm, soft 



198 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

windy Devonshire September. Hubert and I bathed in the 
great breakers. We had wonderful teas in the valley, and 
followed the staghounds on Exmoor. We talked of all the 
books under the sun, and I wrote a poem in blank verse which 
was afterwards published in the Anglo-Saxon Review. 

Later in the autumn, I stayed a few days at a chateau near 
Fontainebleau, and saw the forest in all the glory of its autumn 
foliage, with the tall trees ablaze, like funeral torches for the 
dying year ; and the gardens of the chateau, and the splendid 
rooms seemed more melancholy than ever, as though the ghosts 
of the kings and queens of France were there unseen ; and, 
looking at the gorgeous raiment of the fading forest, I thought 
of Mary Stuart putting on her most splendid robes on the 
morning of her execution, and mounting the scaffold in flaming 

satin. 

" And all in red as of a funeral flame, 
And clothed as if with sunset." 

There are no sadder places in the world than Versailles, Fon- 
tainebleau, and Compiegne ; those empty, deserted shells where 
there was once so much glory and so much gaiety, so much 
bustle and so much drama, and which are now hollow museums 
laid bare to the scrutiny of every profane sight-seer. 

During the autumn of 1899, in Paris, I received a visit from 
Reggie Balfour, whom I had known at Cambridge, although he 
went to Cambridge after I had left. He was a brilliant scholar 
and had done great things at Cambridge. He had been staying 
at Angers to study French. We talked of books, of the Dreyfus 
case, and he suddenly said that he felt a strong desire to become 
a Catholic. I was extremely surprised and disconcerted. 
Up till that moment I had only known two people who had 
become Catholics : one was a relation, who had married a 
Catholic, and the other was an undergraduate, who had never 
discussed the matter except to say he must have all or nothing. 
When Reggie Balfour told me this I was amazed. I remember 
saying to him that the Christian religion was not so very old, 
and so small a strip in the illimitable series of the creeds of 
mankind ; but that if he believed in the Christian revelation, 
and in the Sacraments of the Anglican Church, he would find 
it difficult to turn round and say those Sacraments had been an 
illusion. I begged him to wait. I said there was nothing to 
prevent his worshipping in Catholic churches without commit- 



PARIS 199 

ting himself intellectually to a step that must cramp his freedom. 
I advised him to live in the porch without entering the building. 
I said finally : " My trouble is I cannot believe in the first 
proposition, the source of all dogma. If I could do that, if 
I could tell the first lie, I quite see that all the rest would 
follow." 

He took me one morning to Low Mass at Notre Dame des 
Victoires. I had never attended a Low Mass before in my life. 
It impressed me greatly. I had imagined Catholic services 
were always long, complicated, and overlaid with ritual. A 
Low Mass, I found, was short, extremely simple, and somehow 
or other made me think of the catacombs and the meetings 
of the Early Christians. One felt one was looking on at some- 
thing extremely ancient. The behaviour of the congregation, 
and the expression on their faces impressed me too. To them 
it was evidently real. 

We worked together at some poems I had written, and 
Reggie arranged to have a small pamphlet of them privately 
printed for me, at the Cambridge University Press, which was 
done that Christmas. 

When we got back to London, he sent me this epitaph, which 
is translated from the Latin, and is to be found at Rome in the 
Church of St. John Lateran, the date being about 1600 : 

" Ci-git Robert Pechom, anglais, catholique, qui apres la 
rupture de l'Angleterre avec l'eglise, a quitte l'Angleterre ne 
pouvant y vivre sans la foi et qui, venu a Rome y est mort ne 
pouvant y vivre sans patrie." 

The next year saw the opening of the Exhibition. On the 
17th of March, I went with Reggie Lister to the first night 
of L'Aiglon. It was a momentous first night. All the most 
notable people in the literary and social world of Paris were 
there : Anatole France, Jules Lemattre, Halevy, Sardou, Robert 
de Montesquiou, Albert Vandal, Henry Houssaye, Paul Hervieu, 
Coquelin, Madame Greffuhle. The excitement was tense. 
Sarah had a tremendous reception. When she spoke the line, 
which occurs in the first scene, " Je n'aime pas beaucoup que la 
France soit neutre," there was a roar of applause, but this, one 
felt, was political rather than artistic enthusiasm. The first 
quiet dialogue between the Duke and the courtiers held the 
audience, and we felt that Sarah's calm and biting irony por- 
tended great reserves held in store, and when the scene of the 



200 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

history lesson followed, which Sarah played with an increasing 
accelerando and crescendo, and when she came to the lines : 

" II suit l'ennemi ; sent qu'il l'a dans la main ; 
Un soir il dit au camp : ' Demain ! ' Le lendemain, 
II dit en galopant sur le front de bandiere : 
' Soldats, il faut finir par un coup de tonnerre ! ' 
II va, tachant de gris l'etat-major vermeil ; 
L'armee est une mer ; il attend le soleil ; 
II le voit se lever du haut d'un promontoire ; 
Et, d'un sourire, il met ce soleil dans l'histoire!" 1 

she carried them off with a pace and an intensity that went 
through the large theatre like an electric shock. People were 
crying everywhere in the audience, and I remember Reggie Lister 
saying to me in the entr'acte that what moved him at a play or 
in a book was hardly ever the pathetic, but when people did or 
said splendid things. 

The rest of the play, from that moment until the end, was 
a triumphant progression of cunningly administered electric 
thrills which were deliriously received by a quivering audience. 

When it was all over and people talked of it the next and 
the following days in drawing-rooms and in the press, the 
enthusiasm began to cool down. 

The following extracts from an article which I wrote in the 
Speaker about it, immediately after the performance, give an 
idea of the impression the play made at the time : 

" Monsieur Rostand, thanks to his rapid and brilliant career, 
and the colossal success of Cyrano de Bergerac, is certainly the 
French author of the present day who attracts the greatest 
amount of public attention in France, whose talent is the most 
keenly debated, whose claims are supported and disputed with 
the greatest vehemence. His popularity in France is as great 
as that of Mr. Kipling in England ; and in France, as is the case 
with Mr. Kipling in England, there are not wanting many and 
determined advocates of the devil. Some deny to M, Rostand 
the title of poet, while admitting that he is a clever playwright ; 
some say that he has no poetical talent whatsoever. In the case 
of poetical plays the public is probably in the long run the only 
judge. Never in the world's history has it been seen that the 
really magnificent poetical play has proved a lasting failure, 

1 There is nothing remarkable in the verse, but as a piece of 
dramatic action the speech was supremely effective. 



PARIS 201 

or a really bad poetical play a perennial success. Of course 
there have been plays which, like other works that have come 
before their season, the public have taken years to appreciate ; 
while, on the other hand, the public have patronised plays of 
surprising mediocrity and vulgarity ; these works, however, 
have never resisted the hand of time. But in the main the 
public has been right, and those who take the opposite view 
generally belong to a class alluded to by Pope : 

' So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng 
By chance go right, they purposely go wrong.' 

Certainly in M. Rostand's case, whatever may be the exact 
' place ' of his plays in the evolution of the world's poetical 
drama, one thing is quite certain : his plays are triumphantly 
successful. This for a play is a merit in itself. After the 
triumph of Cyrano it was difficult to believe that L'Aiglon would 
attain the same level of merit and success, and never was 
a success more discounted beforehand. For weeks L'Aiglon 
was the main topic of conversation in Paris, and provided end- 
less copy for the newspapers. Another thing is certain : how- 
ever the aesthetic value of L'Aiglon may be rated in the future, 
it constitutes for the present another gigantic success. Never 
did a play come at a more opportune moment. At a time 
when the French are thinking that their country has for a long 
time been playing too insignificant a part in European politics, 
when the country is still convalescent and suffering from the 
vague discomfort subsequent on a feverish crisis, fretting and 
chafing under the colourless mediocrity of a regime that falls 
short of their flamboyant ideal, M. Rostand comes skilfully 
leading a martial orchestra, and sets their pulses throbbing, 
their ears tingling, and their hearts beating to the inspiring 
tunes of Imperial France. 

" M. Rostand's play is certainly a forward step in his poetical 
career. It has the same colour and vitality as Cyrano ; the 
same incomparable instinct for stage effect, the same skill and 
dexterity in the manipulation of words which amounts to 
jugglery, the same fertility in poetical images and felicitous 
couplets that we find in his earlier works ; but, besides this, 
it has something that they have not — a graver atmosphere, a 
larger outlook, a deeper note ; the fabric, though the builder's 
skill is the same, is less perfect as a whole, more irregular, but 



202 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

in it we hear mysterious echoes, and the footfall of the Epic 
Muse, which compensates for the unevenness of the carpentry. 

" In L'Aiglon we breathe the atmosphere of the epic of 
Napoleon. Although the scenes which M. Rostand presents 
to us deal only with the sunset of that period, the glories and 
vicissitudes of that epoch are suggested to us ; we do not see 
the things themselves, but we are conscious of their spirit, their 
poetic existence and essence. M. Rostand evokes them, not 
by means of palpable shapes, but, like a wizard, in the images 
of his phrases and the sound of his verse, and thus we see them 
more clearly than if they had been presented to us in the form 
of elaborate tableaux or spectacular battle-pieces. 

"The existence of Napoleon n. was in itself a tragic fact. 
Yet more tragic if, as Metternich is reported to have said of 
him, he had ' a head of iron and a body of glass.' And a degree 
more tragic still is M. Rostand's creation of a prince whose 
frail tenement of clay is consumed by ambition and aspiration, 
and who is conscious, at times, of the vanity of his aspiration 
and the hopelessness of his ambition. Thus tossed to and fro, 
from ecstasy to despair, he is another Hamlet, born, not to 
avenge a crime against his father, but to atone for his father's 
crimes. Perhaps the most poetical moment of the play is 
when the prince realises, on the plain of Wagram, that he himself 
is the atonement ; that he is the white wafer of sacrifice offered 
as an expiation for so many oceans of blood. M. Rostand has 
chosen this theme, pregnant with pathos, as his principal 
motif. It is needless to relate the play. . . . The close of the 
Fifth Act is perhaps the finest thing in conception of the whole ; 
in it we see Napoleon, after the failure of an attempted escape 
to France, alone on the battlefield of Wagram, pale in his white 
uniform on the great green moonlit plain, with the body of the 
faithful soldier of the Old Guard, who killed himself rather 
than be taken by the Austrians, lying before him. Gradually 
in the sighing winds Napoleon imagines he hears the moans of 
the soldiers who once strewed the plain, until the fancy grows 
into hallucination, until he sees himself surrounded by regi- 
ments of ghosts, and hears the groans, the call, and the clamour 
of phantom armies growing louder and louder till they culminate 
in the cry of ' Vive l'empereur.' He hears the tramping of 
men, the champing and neighing of chargers, and the music of 
the band ; he thinks the ' Grande Armee ' has come to life, and 



PARIS 203 

rushes joyfully to meet it ; the vision is then dispelled, and the 
irony of the reality is made plain, for it is the white uniforms of 
the Austrian regiment (of which he is Colonel) that appear in 
the plain. The scene is almost Shakespearean in its effect of 
beauty and terror. 

" Finally, in the last Act, we see the Roi de Rome dying in 
his gilded cage while he listens to the account of his baptism 
in Paris, which is read out to him as he dies. He who as a child 
' eut pour hochet la couronne de Rome ' is now an obscure 
and insignificant Hapsburg princeling, dying forgotten by the 
world, without a friend, and under the eye of his imperturbable 
enemy. 

" The play has already been accused of incoherence, lengthi- 
ness, and inequality ; of too rapid transitions, of a clash in 
style between preciosity and brutality. It has been compared 
unfavourably with Cyrano. . . . Fault is found now, as it was 
before, with the form of M. Rostand's verses ; they are no 
doubt better heard on the stage than read in the study, and 
this surely shows that they fulfil their conditions. His verses 
are not those of Racine, of Alfred de Vigny, or of Lecomte de 
Lisle . . . but they have a poetic quality and a value of their 
own ; and while their clarion music is still ringing in my ears 
I should think it foolish to quarrel with them and to criticise 
them in a captious spirit ; possibly on reading L'Aiglon the 
impression may be different. For the present, still under the 
spell of the enthusiasm and shouts of applause which his couplets 
inspired on the memorable first night of the play, I can but 
thank the author who brought before my eyes, with the skilful 
and clamorous music of his harps and horns, his trumpets and 
fifes and drums, the vision of an heroic epoch and the shadows 
of Homeric battles — the red sun and the cannon balls shivering 
the ice at Austerlitz, the Pope crowning another Caesar at 
Notre Dame, Moscow in flames and the Great Army scattered 
on the plains of Russia, and the lapping of the tideless sea 
round St. Helena." 

Many of those who had been most enthusiastic at the first 
night of L'Aiglon lost no time in saying they had been mistaken, 
and that it was after all but a poor affair. Someone said that 
Rostand's verse was made en caoutchouc. I heard someone 
ask Robert de Montesquiou his opinion soon after the play 
was produced. He said he thought the verse was in the best 



204 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Victor Hugo tradition ; some of it, Metternich's monologue 
on Napoleon's hat, very fine. Somebody mentioned the more 
sentimental verses on La Petite Source : " Cela doit etre," said 
Montesquiou, " de Madame Rostand." 

Arthur Strong, after he saw the play, told me it had carried 
him away, and the fact of Sarah Bernhardt being a woman, and 
not a young woman, had mattered to him no more than the 
footlights or the painted scenery ; he had accepted it, he had 
been made to accept it gladly, by the fire of the play and the 
power of the interpretation. 

The Paris Exhibition of 1900 was opened on the 14th of 
April, and the whole of the Embassy staff attended that 
ceremony in uniform. I remember little of it. The features 
of the Exhibition were the trottoir roulant, a moving platform, 
that took visitors all round the Exhibition without their having 
to stir a foot ; the pictures in the Grand Palais ; the little city 
on the left bank of the Seine, where every nation was repre- 
sented by a house, and where, in the English house, there was 
a room copied from Broughton Castle, full of Gainsboroughs ; 
the Petit Palais, a gem in itself; and, besides these, there 
were the usual features of all exhibitions — side-shows, bales 
of chocolate, and galleries full of machinery and implements. 

Towards the end of April I was taken by M. Castillon de 
Saint Victor for an expedition in a free balloon. I had been 
up twice in a captive balloon in the Jardin d'Acclimatation, and 
had not enjoyed the experience, especially once on a windy day. 
I was not at all sure I was not going to dislike the free balloon, 
and I felt a pang of fear whenever I thought of it beforehand ; 
but when the moment of starting came, and the balloon was 
released, and rose as gently and as imperceptibly as a puff of 
smoke from Saint Denis, and soared higher and higher into the 
dazzling sky without noise, without our experiencing any effect 
of motion or breeze, I felt intoxicated with pleasure. We 
went up to three thousand feet. It was like reaching another 
planet, an Olympic region of serenity and light, and one had no 
desire to leave it or to descend again to the earth. 

We ate luncheon from a basket and drank a little rum, 
which was said to be the best beverage in a balloon, and we 
took photographs from the air. I little thought that I should 
one day have something to do with aircraft, air photographs, 
and all the many details of air navigation. We floated on 



PARIS 205 

across Paris in a south-easterly direction. We came down low 
over a chateau belonging to the Rothschilds' and over the 
forest of Crecy; later in the afternoon, we dropped a guide 
rope and floated over the country at a height of about two 
hundred feet, and as the evening came on, the balloon came 
down still lower and sailed along just over the tree-tops. Finally 
we landed. The balloon hopped like a football, the basket car 
was overturned, and the gas was let out. We landed in a 
deserted piece of flat country, but no sooner was the balloon on 
the ground than, as always happens, a crowd sprang from 
nowhere and helped us. The balloon was put in a cart, and we 
walked to the town of Provins, which was not far off, and there 
we took the train to Paris. The next time I visited Provins 
it was the General Headquarters of the French Army during 
the latter part of the European War. 

I spent a week of that spring at Fontainebleau and Chantilly. 
There were a great many English people in Paris. One night, 
at the opera, in a box, an English lady was sitting, a large 
emerald poised high on her hair ; the audience looked at nothing 
else, and an old Frenchman, who had been an ornament of the 
Second Empire, came up to me in the entr'acte and said: 
" II est impossible d'etre plus jolie que cette femme." Shortly 
after this I travelled up to Paris from Fontainebleau with this 
same lady. The train was crowded, and we just managed to 
find room in the barest of provincial railway carriages. There 
were some private soldiers in the carriage, and some substantial 
women in sabots with large baskets. They gazed at her with 
childish delight, unmixed admiration, and surprised wonder, 
as she sat, making the boards of the third-class carriage look 
like a throne, in cool, diaphanous, lilac and white muslins and 
a large bunch of flowers, a vision of radiance and grace ; it 
reminded me of the large masses of lilies of the valley and roses 
you suddenly meet with in a dark, narrow street corner on the 
first fine day of spring in Florence. 

We went to a shop in Paris where she wanted to buy a pair 
of gloves. W 7 hen she asked how much they were, the lady who 
was serving her said : " Pour vous rien, Madame, vous etes trop 
jolie ! " 

I used to see a great deal of Monsieur and Madame de 
Jaucourt, whom I could remember ever since the early days of 
my childhood. Monsieur de Jaucourt had the most delightful 



206 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

way of expressing things. One day when Madame de Jaucourt 
was pressing rr^self and another of the secretaries to stay with 
them in the country, he said: "Ma chere, les jeunes gens ont 
beaucoup mieux a. faire que d'aller passer des heures a la 
campagne ! " He was passionately fond of Paris. " On me gate 
mon cher Paris," he used to say. After luncheon, he would 
interview the cook and discuss every detail of last night's dinner, 
praising this and criticising that, with extraordinary nicety and 
precision ; and when he gave a dance in his house for boys and 
girls, on the afternoon preceding it, he would have different 
samples of lemonade and orangeade sent up to taste and choose 
from, to see if they were sweet enough but not too sweet. The 
lemonade was for the juvenile buffet. Women's bets used to 
amuse him, and when they talked about racing, he would say : 
" Les paris des femmes sont a crever de rire." He was a con- 
noisseur of artistic things, and enjoyed a fine house, and beautiful 
objets d'art. He insisted on my going to see the chateau of Vaux, 
which he said was the finest house he knew. He said what 
distinguished it from other houses was that it was not crammed 
with valuable things for the sake of ostentation, show, or orna- 
ment, but where a piece of furniture was wanted, there it would 
be, and it would be a good one. 

Monsieur de Jaucourt had a house not far from Paris in the 
country, and I remember playing croquet one day there. His 
daughter, Francoise, aimed carefully at the ball and missed the 
hoop, upon which M. de Jaucourt said, with a sigh : " Ma pauvre 
fille, tu as joue sans renechir." I often used to dine at the ' ' Cercle 
de l'Union." There were about four or five old men who used 
to dine there every night ; a few, a very few, younger men, but 
no quite young Frenchmen. 

One night someone arrived and asked for some cold soup. 
There was none. In a fury of passion this member asked for 
the book of complaints. When it was brought, he wrote in it : 
" N'ayant pas pu trouver un consomme froid j'ai du diner hors 
du Club." 

One night the new house, built by Count Boni de Castellane 
in the Bois de Boulogne, was being discussed. Someone said 
it was like Trianon, and that it would be difficult to keep up. 
Someone else who was there said : " Mais Boni est beaucoup plus 
riche que Louis xiv." M. Du Lau and General Gallifet used 
often to dine there to discuss the days of their youth and talk 



PARIS 207 

over the beauties and even the wines of the past ; General 
Gallifet told us one night how he won sums of money by playing 
with a piece of rope taken from a gibbet in his pocket, and that 
the best wine he had ever drunk in his life was in the Rhine 
country. Now they are all dead, and I suppose their place is 
taken by those who were the older young men in those days, 
but I have no doubt that they sit round in the same chairs and 
sometimes complain if there is no consomme froid to be had. 

In the summer of 1900, I went on leave to London for a few 
weeks and attempted to pass an examination in International 
Law after a few weeks' preparation. I went up for the examina- 
tion, and I don't think I was able to answer a single question ; 
my crammer told me I had not the legal mind. At the end of 
the summer, I was told that the Foreign Office wanted me to go 
to Copenhagen, and at the beginning of August I started for 
Denmark as Third Secretary to Her Majesty's Legation. 



CHAPTER XI 
COPENHAGEN 

I ARRIVED at Copenhagen in August. I went there direct 
from Paris and crossed whatever intervening seas lie 
between Denmark and Germany via Hamburg and 
Kiel. I had been given an ointment made of tar by a French 
hair specialist to check my rapidly increasing baldness, and I 
applied it before I went to bed in my cabin, which contained 
three other berths. When the other passengers, who had in- 
tended to share my cabin, put their heads into it, they were 
appalled by the smell of tar, and thought that they had been 
given berths in the sail-room by the steward. They com- 
plained loudly, and refused to sleep there, so I had the cabin 
to myself. 

I stayed at the Hotel d'Angleterre, and on the morning of my 
arrival presented myself to the Minister, Sir Edward Goschen. 
He was alone at the Legation. I took rooms in a street not far 
from the Legation, and settled down to the quiet routine of 
Legation life in a small capital. 

Copenhagen in August seemed unusually quiet. The sentries 
outside the Amalienborg Palace looked like big wooden dolls 
in their blue uniforms, white trousers, white belts, and bear- 
skins. 

I immediately began to have Danish lessons from the 
British Vice-Consul, who was a Dane, and we soon began to read 
Hans Andersen in Danish. The diplomatic world in Copen- 
hagen was a little world by itself. It consisted of the Russian 
Minister, Count Benckendorff, who, when I arrived, was there 
by himself ; the Austrian Minister, Count Wildenbruch, who 
lived at the Hotel d'Angleterre, and never went out and rarely 
saw anybody ; the French Minister, M. Jusserand, one of the 
most erudite of English scholars besides being one of the most 

charming of Frenchmen; and the German Minister, M. Schon, 

208 



COPENHAGEN 209 

who had a passion for dressing up in fancy dress ; the Norwegian 
Minister, M. de Knagenhjelm ; and the Italian Minister. 

The diplomatic world mixed little with the Danes. I 
once heard a Dane say to another Dane : "Do you receive 
diplomats ? " in the same tone of surprise as would have 
been appropriate had the question been: "Do you receive 
police-spies ? " 

I think the theatres were shut when I arrived, and the only 
amusements were to go out sailing which I used to do often 
with Sir Edward, who had a yacht, and in the evenings to have 
dinner at the Tivoli music-hall, which was an out-of-door park 
full of side-shows and was pleasantly illuminated. 

The staff of the British Legation consisted of a First Secre- 
tary, Sir Alan Johnstone, and a Chancery servant : a Dane called 
Ole, who was a charming, simple person like a character in 
Hans Andersen, vaguely intoxicated sometimes, paternal, easily 
upset, and endlessly obliging. 

Sir Alan Johnstone had a little house in the country, and 
there I often used to spend Sunday, and there I made the ac- 
quaintance of Count Benckendorff. The first time I met him 
we had a violent argument about the Dreyfus case. He was a 
firm believer in Dreyfus' innocence and so was I, but that did 
not prevent us arguing as though we held diametrically opposite 
opinions. 

In the middle of August, Edmund Gosse paid a visit to Den- 
mark and I went to him meet at Munkebjerg, which entailed 
a long cross-country journey over many canals and in trains 
that were borne on steamers. Munkebjerg was a lovely place 
on the top of a high hill with little woods reaching down to the 
water. There, for the first time, I experienced the long, green, 
luminous twilights of the north. Edmund Gosse was inspired 
by the surroundings to write a book called Hypolympia, which 
he afterwards dedicated to me. He imagined that the gods of 
Greece arrived at Munkebjerg immediately after their exile, 
and on that theme he wove a fantasy. 

One of the most important duties at Copenhagen was to go 
to the railway station to meet the various royalties who used 
to visit the King of Denmark, and another one was to receive 
English Royalties at the door of the English church when they 
attended divine service on Sundays. We used often to see 
the King of Denmark out riding, and although I think he was 
14 



210 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

then eighty years old, he looked on horseback, so extraordinarily 
young was his figure, like a man of thirty. 

I learnt Danish fairly quickly and soon I could follow the 
plays at the Kongelige Theatre and at other theatres. The 
Kongelige Theatre was a State-supported institution with an 
ancient tradition and an excellent troupe of actors and dancers. 
They performed opera : Gluck, Mozart, and Wagner; ballets ; 
the classic Danish comedies of Holberg ; Moliere ; Shakespeare ; 
modern comedies and the dramas of Ibsen, Tolstoi, and Holger 
Drachman. The Shakespeare productions were particularly 
interesting and far more remarkable than any I ever saw in 
Berlin. They made use of the Apron Stage ; on a small back- 
cloth at the back of the stage changed with the changing scene ; 
the back-cloth was framed in a Gothic arch, which was supported 
by pillars raised on low steps. A curtain could be lowered 
across this arch, and the actors could proceed with the play in 
front of this curtain, without necessitating the lowering of the 
larger curtain. This small scene was extremely effective. It 
was just enough to give the eye the keynote of the play ; and 
in the historical plays of Shakespeare, in Richard III. for 
instance, it was ideal. I saw Richard III., King Lear, and A 
Midsummer Night's Dream ; the latter was a beautiful and gay 
production ; the actor who played Bottom had a rich vein of 
humour and a large exuberant personality, and the fairy dances 
were beautifully organised and executed. Of the modern 
drama I saw Tolstoi's Powers of Darkness, which made a 
shattering effect, Ibsen's Doll's House and Hedda Gabler, and 
Holger Drachman's Gurre, and some comedies by Otto Benzon. 

The performance of the Doll's House with Fru Hennings' 
Nora was unforgettable. I have seen many Noras ; Eleonora 
Duse and Rejane and a great comedian in Berlin ; but Fru 
Hennings played the part as if it had been written for her ; she 
was Nora ; she made the whole play more than natural, she 
made it inevitable. ' ' Quelle navrante ironie ! quel desenchante- 
ment a fond ! " said Jules Lemaitre, writing about Duse's per- 
formance of Magda. In Fru Hennings' interpretation of Nora, 
the irony was indeed harrowing, and the disenchantment com- 
plete ; but irony, disillusion, weariness, disgust were all merged 
into a wonderful harmony, as the realities of life gradually 
dawned on the little singing-bird, and the doll changed into a 
woman. She made the transformation, which whenever I had 



COPENHAGEN 211 

seen the play before seemed so difficult to believe in, of the Nora 
of the first act into the Nora of the last act seem the most 
natural thing in the world. Then Fru Hennings had the 
advantage of being a Dane and of speaking the words of the 
play in the language in which they had been written. She 
had a musical rippling voice and a plaintive grace of gesture. 
Holger Drachman's drama Gurre was a terrible and intensely 
.dramatic poetic drama, with a love duet of impassioned lyricism 
and melody, and an almost unbearable scene, in which the 
Queen has her rival scalded to death in a steam-bath. Hedda 
Gabler I confess to not being able to endure when I saw it ; it 
was beautifully acted ; too well acted ; there seemed to be no 
difference between what was going on on the stage and in the 
audience. I had a sudden uprush of satiety with Norwegian 
drama : with Ibsen, with problem plays, with Denmark, with 
the North ; and I remember going out of the theatre after the 
second act, in revolt and disgust, and not being able to stand 
any more of it. But that was an accidental impression arising 
from a surfeit of such things, and from an overdose of Scandi- 
navian gloom and Norwegian complexity; a short course of 
musical comedies would have soon enabled one to appreciate 
the drama of Ibsen once more ; as it was, I heard it after a 
year and a half's stay at Copenhagen, and at that moment I 
had had just a drop too much of that kind of thing. 

I also saw When we dead awaken when it was first produced, 
and this again had no effect on me, save one of vague and 
teasing perplexity. 

The music at Copenhagen was as interesting as the drama. 
Mozart's operas were admirably given at the Kongelige Theatre. 
I remember a fine performance of Don Giovanni, the Nozze 
di Figaro, and Gluck's Orpheo, concerts where Beethoven's 
Symphonies were played, and a recital of Paderewski where 
he played Liszt's arrangement of the Erlkonig. When he came 
to the end of it, the impression was that he himself had 
experienced that ride in the night ; that he had battled with 
the Erl King for the life of the child, and that it was he and 
not the child who was dead. 

As soon as I could speak Danish, I made several friends 
among the Danes. I sometimes spent the evening at Dr. George 
Brandes' house, and more often at that of Otto Benzon, the 
playwright, who was extremely kind to me. The intelligentsia 



212 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

of Copenhagen were highly cultivated ; they were well-to-do 
and had fine collections of modern pictures. The meals were 
long and were often followed by a still longer supper. The 
days were short in winter at Copenhagen ; the sun appeared 
to set at two ; the wind blew in every direction at once down 
the Bred Gade. Copenhagen in winter had depressing elements. 
I had, in the meantime, made great friends with the Bencken- 
dorffs at the Russian Legation. 

Just as in the art of writing, and in fact in all arts, the best 
style is that where there is no style, or rather where we no 
longer notice the style, so appropriate and so inevitable, so 
easy the thing said, sung, or done is made to appear, so in 
diplomacy the most delightful diplomats were those about 
whom there was no diplomatic style, nothing which made you 
think of diplomacy. Michael Herbert was one of these, and so 
pre-eminently was Count Benckendorff. When he was Am- 
bassador in London he took root easily in English life, and made 
friends instantly and without effort in many different worlds, 
so his personality and his services are well known to English- 
men. I doubt, however, if they know how great the services 
were which he rendered at times both to our country as well as 
to his own. 

All through the war, till a few days before his death, he was 
giving his whole heart and soul to his work, and every nerve 
of his being was strained to the utmost. The war killed him 
as certainly as if he had fought in the trenches. He was 
astonishingly far-sighted and clear-sighted. In 1903 he told me 
there would be a revolution in Russia directly there was a war. 
At the time of the Agadir crisis, he told me that the future of 
Europe entirely depended on the policy of the German Govern- 
ment : on whether the German Emperor and his Government 
decided or not to embark on a Louis xiv. policy of ambition 
and aggression, and try to make Germany the only European 
power. 

When the Emperor of Russia issued the manifesto of 17th 
October, and the Russians were bedecking their cities with 
flags, because they thought they had received a constitution, 
he made it excruciatingly clear that it was nothing of the kind ; 
and he predicted no less clearly what would be the results of so 
ambiguous an act, and so dangerously elastic a charter. 

His public career belongs to history. I had the privilege 



COPENHAGEN 213 

of knowing him as a private person and of finding in him the 
kindest and the wisest of friends. 

I think his most striking quality was his keenness. The 
way he would throw himself into the discussion, the topic, or 
the occupation of the moment, whether it was a book, a play, a 
picture, a piece of music, a political question, a wolf-hunt, a 
speech, a problem, even an acrostic to be guessed, or the dredging 
of a pond. 

Whenever I wrote anything new he always made me read 
it aloud to him, and he was in himself an extraordinarily 
exhilarating and encouraging public. 

He was all for one's doing more and more, for finding out 
what one could not do and then doing it. 

He once tried to persuade me to go into Parliament. When 
I objected that I had no power of dealing with political questions, 
and no understanding of many affairs that a member of Parlia- 
ment is supposed to understand, he said : " Rubbish ! You could 
do all that part, just as you wrote a parody of Anatole France ; 
people would think you knew." 

He hated pessimism. He hated the Oriental, passive view 
of life, especially if it was preached by Occidentals. The look- 
ing forward to a Nirvana and a closed door. He hated every- 
thing negative. Suicide to him was the one unpardonable 
sin. He hated affectation, especially cosmopolitan affectation, 
what he used to call " le faux esprit Parisien." " Je prefere," 
he used to say, " le bon sens anglais." He was extremely 
argumentative and would put his whole soul into an argument 
on the most trivial point ; and he was as unblushingly unscrupu- 
lous as Dr. Johnson in his use of the weapons of contradiction, 
although, unlike Dr. Johnson, however heated the argument, he 
was never rude, even for a second ; he didn't know how to be 
rude. He spoke the most beautiful natural French, the French 
of a more elegant epoch than ours, with a slightly classical 
tinge in it. He spoke it not only as well as a Frenchman, but 
better ; that is to say, he spoke without any frills or unnecessary 
ornament, either of phrase or accent, with complete ease and 
naturalness. 

He spoke English just as naturally. I remember on one 
occasion, shortly after he arrived in London, his being taken 
for an Englishman throughout a whole dinner-party by his 
host. But he used to say that this was sheer bluff and that 



214 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

his command of the language was limited. His beautiful 
manners, and the perfection of his courtesy came from the same 
absence of style I have already alluded to. He was natural and 
unaffected with everyone, because he was chez soi partout ; and 
his distinction, one felt, was based on a native integrity, a 
fundamental horror of anything common, or mean, or unkind, 
the incapacity of striking a wrong note in word or deed : the 
impossibility of hurting anyone's feelings. A member of the 
Russian intelligentsia, writing in a provincial newspaper in 
Russia, about one of the many European crises that threatened 
Europe before the outbreak of the Great War, said : " We 
should have been dragged into a war, had we not had at the 
time, as our Ambassador in London, the first gentleman in 
Europe." That is, I think, his best and most fitting epitaph. 

I shall never have the benefit of his criticism any more, his 
keenness, his almost boyish interest, his decided, argumentative 
disagreement leaping into a blaze over a trifling point, and 
never again enjoy that glow of satisfaction — worth a whole 
world of praise — which I used to feel when he said about some- 
thing, whether a poem, a newspaper article, a story, or a letter, 
or the most foolish of rhymes : " C'est tres joli." 

I moved from my rooms in the town to the Legation and 
had most of my meals with the Goschens. Sir Edward's in- 
imitable humour, his minute observation of detail, and his 
keen eye for the ludicrous, the quaint and all the absurd in- 
cidents of daily life — and especially of diplomatic life — made 
all the official side of things, the dinner-parties, the interviews 
with ministers, the ceremonies at the station, the pompousness 
of the diplomats, extraordinarily amusing. Besides this, he was 
childishly fond of every kind of game, such as battledore and 
shuttlecock, and cup and ball. 

Sir Edward went on leave in the autumn of 1900, and for a 
fortnight, from 10th October to 22nd October, I had the glory 
of being in charge, of being acting Charge d'Affaires of the 
Legation, so that when the Foreign Office wrote to me they 
signed dispatches, "Yours with great truth." The first thing 
which had to be done was to leave cards on all the Corps 
Diplomatique. This duty was always carried out by 01 e, the 
Chancery servant. I gave him a sheaf of my cards to leave ; 
he left some of them, but I think he considered that I was 
altogether too young to be taken seriously as a Charge d'Affaires, 



COPENHAGEN 215 

so he left no cards on the minor diplomats, who lived out of the 
immediate radius of the British Legation. About three days 
after I had been in charge, Count Benckendorff told me that 
the minor diplomats who had received no cards from me had 
held a meeting of indignation ; I was to lose no time in smooth- 
ing down their ruffled sensibilities, so I left the cards myself. 
The only diplomatic interview I remember having was with 
the future King of Greece,, who came to see me in my room 
and talked about something I didn't understand. My brief 
era of sole responsibility was put an end to after a fortnight by 
the arrival of a new First Secretary in place of Alan Johnson. 
His name was Herbert. Shortly after his arrival Ethel Smyth 
paid a visit to Copenhagen on her way back to England from 
Berlin, where she had been negotiating for the performance of 
her opera, Der Wald. She wanted to make the acquaintance 
of the Benckendorffs, and she sang her opera to us, her Mass, 
and many songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Grieg, besides 
many English and Scotch ballads. Count Benckendorff, who 
was musical, was enchanted with her singing, with her inter- 
pretation of the songs she sang, " la richesse de son execution," 
her vitality, her good humour, her keenness, her passionate 
interest in everything. She played golf in the daytime and 
made music in the evening. 

At Christmas, Sir Edward's sons arrived and we had a 
Christmas-tree in the house, and a treat for the church choir, and 
endless games of battledore and shuttlecock in the Legation 
ballroom. Then, suddenly, came the unbelievable news that 
Queen Victoria was dead. A telegram arrived on the 22nd 
January, worded thus : 

" I am profoundly grieved to inform you that the Queen 
expired this evening at six-thirty. Notify melancholy intelli- 
gence to Government." 

I was just going home for a little leave, but now it seemed 
impossible : there would be too much to do. But Sir Edward 
insisted on my going, all the same. Herbert was arriving back 
from leave, and he said he could get on without me ; so I went. 
I saw the funeral procession from a house near the Marble Arch. 
The only splash of colour in the greyness and gloom of the long 
procession was the regalia and the bright pall on the gun-carriage 
that bore the coffin, and everyone agreed that the most imposing 



216 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

figure in the procession was the German Emperor in a great 
grey cloak. But the most impressive feature of the whole 
ceremony was the attitude of the crowd : its size, its silence, 
the universal black. London was like a dead city, and as 
someone said at the time : " One went about feeling as if one 
had cheated at cards." I felt that what " Onkel Adolph " used 
to say at Hildesheim was true : " Die Engldnder lieben ihre alte 
Konigin " (" The English love their old Queen "). 

In February I went to Karlsruhe to hear Ethel Smyth's 
first opera, Fantasio, performed at the Hoft eater with Mottl 
conducting. Fantasio is an opera in two acts written on 
Musset's play. Ethel Smyth wrote "the libretto herself in 
German. The opera contains some lovely songs, especially 
one that begins : " Reite ohne Sattelpferd," and some of the 
most delicate music Ethel Smyth ever composed, but the 
libretto is undramatic, and there are not enough bones in the 
framework to support the musical structure. Mottl conducted 
the orchestra beautifully ; the opera was respectfully received, 
but without any great enthusiasm. When the performance 
was over, we had supper with the Grand Duchess of Baden, 
and there I met a cousin of mine, Charlie d'Otrante, whom I 
had not seen since I was a child. He was now, though a Swedish 
subject — his father was a Swede — an officer in the German 
Army. 

I stayed at Copenhagen till the spring. The spring in 
Denmark comes with a rush. All is wintry, without any hint 
of the coming change, and then all of a sudden, and in one 
night, the beech trees are green, and of so startling, vivid, and 
fresh a green that it almost hurts the eye, and through them you 
see the sea, a milky haze, and the sky looks as if it had been 
washed clean. 

In May, I went to London for my first spell of long leave 
since I had passed my examination. I stayed all June and 
July in London, and in the middle of July I went over to Brittany 
to stay a few days with Sarah Bernhardt at her house, the Fort 
des Poulains on the island of Belle-Isle, which is at the extreme 
north of the island. This visit entailed a terrific journey: 
first, a long train journey with many changes, then several 
hours on board a steamer, and then a two hours' drive. The 
house was a little white, square, flat -roofed building among 
the rocks and a stone's-throw from the sea — a great roaring 



COPENHAGEN 217 

grey sea, with huge breakers, leaping cataracts of foam, 
and beaches of grey pebbles. Sarah Bernhardt 's son was 
staying there, Clairin, the artist, and one or two other people. 
The house was built entirely of pitch-pine inside. Sarah used 
to appear at dejeuner. 

She spent all the morning working. In the afternoon she 
played lawn-tennis on a hard court ; after dinner we played 
every kind of game. She was carrying on at the time a heated 
discussion by telegraph with the poet Catulle Mendds about 
the forthcoming production of a poetical play of his, called 
La Vierge d'Avilon. The dispute was about the casting: the 
poet wished one of the female parts to be played by a certain 
actress; Sarah wished otherwise. Telegram after telegram 
was sent and received, each of them several pages in length. 
The poet's telegrams were lyrical and beautifully expressed. 
One of them began: "Vous etes puissante et caline," and 
another addressed her as " La grande faucheuse des illusions." 
How the matter was settled ultimately, I never knew. During 
the whole time I stayed there, Sarah never mentioned the 
theatre, acting, or actors, except as far as they concerned this 
particular business discussion. On the other hand, she talked 
a great deal of her travels all over the world. She talked of 
Greece, and I quoted to her the line of some French poet about 
" des temples roux dans des poussiSres d'or," and asked her 
whether it was an accurate description. She said : " Yes, of the 
Greek temples in Italy " ; but, in Greece, she said it was a case 
of " des temples roses dans des poussieres d'argent." She said 
the most remarkable sight she had ever seen in her life was in 
Australia, when, in a large prairie, she had seen the whole sky 
suddenly filled with a dense flock of brilliantly coloured birds, 
which had risen all at once from the ground and obscured the 
whole horizon with their dazzling coloured plumage. 

She was irresistibly comic at times, full of bubbling gaiety 
and spirits, and an admirable mimic. Jules Huret wrote, while 
I was at Paris, an article about her, in which he described this 
side of her admirably. 

" Quand elle veut," he said, " Sarah est d'un comique 
extraordinaire, par l'outrance de ses images toujours justes, et 
la violence imprevue de ses reparties. Cette gaiete de Sarah 
est bien caracteristique de sa force. C'est evidemment un 
trop plein de seve qui se resout en joie. Elle a des trouvailles, 



218 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

des mimiques, des repliques, une verve, des silences memes, 
qui font irresistiblement eclater le rire autour d 'elle. Elle 
imite certains de ses amis avec une verite comique incroyable." 

What struck me most about her, when I saw her in private 
life, was her radiant and ever-present common-sense. There 
was no nonsense about her, no pose, and no posturing. She 
was completely natural. She took herself as much for granted 
as being the greatest actress in the world, as Queen Victoria 
took for granted that she was Queen of England. She took it 
for granted and passed on. She told me once she had never 
wished to be an actress — that she had gone on to the stage 
against her will ; she would greatly have preferred to have been 
a painter, and all her life she continued to model as it was, 
and did some interesting things in this line, especially some 
bronze fishes and sea-shapes for which she found models at 
Belle-Isle, but when she found she had got to be an actress, she 
- said to herself : " If it has got to be, then I will be the first." 

She said she had never got over her nervousness in playing a 
new part, or for the first time before a new audience ; if she felt 
the audience was friendly, this knowledge half-paralysed her ; 
if, on the other hand, she knew or guessed the audience to be 
hostile, every fibre in her being tightened for the struggle. 
She said that first nights at Paris, when she knew there would 
be hostile elements and critics ready to say she could no longer 
act, always gave her the greatest confidence ; she felt then it 
was a battle, and a battle she could win ; she would force the 
critics to acknowledge that she could act. She told me, too, 
she had never gone an inch out of her way to seek for friends or 
admirers ; she had always let them come to her ; she had never 
taken any notice of them till they forced their attention on her. 
At Belle-Isle I never once heard her allude to any of her parts 
or to any of her triumphs ; but she talked a great deal about 
current events — of the people and politicians she had met in her 
life, in all the countries of Europe — and said some very shrewd 
things about the men who were ruling England at that time. 

I stayed at Belle-Isle three or four days, then I went back 
to London, and at the end of July I started for Russia. I had 
been invited to stay with the Benckendorffs at their house in 
the country, Sosnofka in the Government of Tambov. I did 
not yet know one word of Russian. At Warsaw station I had 
to get out and change. I left my bag for a moment on the seat 



COPENHAGEN 219 

of the carriage. This bag contained my money, my ticket, 
my passport, and several other necessaries. When I came back 
it was gone. I couldn't even tell anyone what had happened. 
As the result of a conversation in dumb show, I was put into 
a train ; it was not the express it should have been, but a slow 
train, and then I had my first experience of the kindness and 
obligingness of the Russian people, for a fellow-traveller re- 
gistered my luggage, bought me a ticket, telegraphed to the 
Benckendorffs for me, to the hotel at Moscow, and supplied me 
with food and money for the journey, which in this train took 
three days. 

Thanks to the kindness of this traveller, I arrived safely at 
Moscow, and at Sosnofka the next day. It was a blazing hot 
August that year in Russia. The country was burnt and 
parched ; the green of the trees had been burnt away. Sos- 
nofka is a large straggling village, with thatched houses. Once 
every seven years the whole village would probably be burnt 
down. Russia was very different from what I had expected. L 
I had read several Russian books in translations — Tolstoy/ 
and Tourgenev — but the background they had formed in my i 
mind was not like Russia at all. In fact, I had never thought 
of these books as happening in Russia. The people they 
described were so like real people, so like people that I had 
known myself, that I had always imagined the action taking : 
place in England or France. I imagined Anna Karenina 
happening in London. Not only did the characters seem real 
and familiar to me, but they struck me as being the only char- 
acters I had ever met in any books which gave me the impres- 
sion that I had myself known them. Dickens' characters are 
real enough, and Thackeray's characters are realistic enough ; 
I believe absolutely in Sam Weller, in Mr. Micawber, in Mr. 
Guppy, in Mrs. Gamp, Mrs. Nickleby, and any you like to 
mention ; the genius of Dickens has made me believe in them ; 
I also believe in the existence of Major Pendennis and Becky 
-Sharp ; I feel I might meet people like that, but I never have ; 
whereas with the characters in Tolstoy's books I am not sure 
whether they belong to bookland at all ; I am not at all sure 
they do not belong to my own past, my own limbo, which is 
peopled by real people and dream people. The background 
which I called up in my mind was something quite unconnected ; 
with Russian books, and something far removed from reality. 



220 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

It was the conventional background borrowed from detective 
stories, and Jules Verne's Michael Strogoff, and from many 
melodramas. That is to say, I imagined barbaric houses, 
glittering and spangled bedizened Asiatic people. The reality 
was so different. Russia seemed such a natural country. 
Everybody seemed to be doing what they liked, without any 
fuss; to wear any clothes they liked; to smoke when and 
where they wished ; to live in such simplicity and without 
any paraphernalia at all. 

As for the landscape, my first impression was that of a 
large, rolling plain ; a church with blue cupolas ; a windmill 
and another church. The plain is dotted with villages, and 
every village is like the last ; the houses are squat, sometimes 
built of logs and sometimes built of bricks, and the roofs are 
thatched with straw. The houses stand at irregular intervals, 
sometimes huddled close together and sometimes with wide 
gaps between them ; it was dusty when I arrived ; the broad 
road, which is not a real road, but an immense stoneless track 
like the roads in America and Australia, was littered with 
straw and various kinds of messes, and along it the creaking 
carts groaned, the peasants driving them leisurely and some- 
times walking beside them. Every now and then there was a 
well with a large wooden see-saw pole to draw the water with ; 
and everywhere, and over everything, the impression of space 
and leisureliness and the absence of hurry. The peasants wore 
loose shirts, with a leather coat thrown carelessly over their 
shoulder, or left in the cart, and the women looked picturesque 
in their everyday clothes ; the folds of their prints and calicoes, 
which had something Biblical and statuesque about them, were 
more impressive to the eye than the silken finery which they 
wore when they went to church on Sunday. 

The Benckendorffs lived at Sosnofka in two small separate 
two-storied houses, which were close together. The kitchen 
was in a separate building apart. In the pantry, the night- 
watchman, Andre, would play draughts in the daytime with 
Alexei, who cleaned the boots. By night the watchman 
watched ; and every now and then blew a whistle. The butler, 
Alexander, was an old soldier in every sense of the word. His 
ingenuity had no end ; nor had his resource. He could make 
anything and do anything ; and in the course of one revolving 
noon he could be chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon. He 



COPENHAGEN 221 

could not only play, but he could make any musical instrument. 
He was an expert mixer of fireworks, an inspired carpenter, 
and he could mend anything. He bore the traces of an early 
military training and drill in his upright shoulders ; and about 
once a month he would disappear and be drunk for two or 
three days. The house was housemaided by two old Russian 
peasants, Mavra and Masha, who wore kerchiefs over their heads 
and speckled calico shawls. Mavra 's devotion to the Bencken- 
dorff children passed all expression ; she cared little for her 
fate and fortune and for that of her own family as long as they 
were alive and well. Michael, the coachman, was another great 
character ; he wore a black cap with peacocks' feathers sticking 
upright in it, and a black tunic with red sleeves. He drove 
the troika, three horses abreast, and no road, or rather no absence 
of road, daunted him ; on the edge of an impossible hill, with 
no track through it, and nothing in sight but bushes and logs, 
and nothing to guess at except holes, if asked whether it was 
possible to go on, he would always laconically answer, "Moshno " 
(" Possible "), and it always was possible. There was an under- 
coachman called Fro. He had his qualities too ; and one of 
these was the way in the winter he would find and recognise a 
track after there had been a blizzard, which had entirely obliter- 
ated all semblance or trace of any path or roadway. Some- 
times a little bit of paper or a stray twig would give him the 
clue. Only one felt just this : that Michael would have been 
quite unshaken in face of any catastrophes ; the earth might 
have opened in front of one, a hostile aeroplane might have 
barred the way, a regiment of machine-gunners might have 
been reported to be in ambush — he would just have nodded 
and quietly said, " Moshno," and nothing more. 

After dinner, that summer we used to sit on the balcony 
or on a stone terrace on one side of the house, and watch the 
message of light, the warning halo the rising moon sent up 
from behind the hill before she rose : 

" Perchance an orb more wondrous than the moon 
Trembles beneath the rim of the dark hills," 

and listen in the thick dark night, while the peasants in the 
village stamped their rhythmical dances to the accompaniment 
of bleating accordions or three-stringed balalaikas ; some watch- 
man's rattle beat time ; the frogs croaked, and sometimes a 



222 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

voice — a rather hoarse, high, slightly sharp voice — began a long- 
drawn-out, high wail, and other voices chimed in, singing the 
same melody in a rough counterpoint. We sat at a little 
green garden-table drinking our coffee, and our nalivka, the 

| delicious clean liqueur distilled from cherries. There seemed 
sy | to be no time in Russia. People slept when they felt 

$ inclined, not necessarily because it was night. Once when 
I went to stay with a friend near Kirsanof he advised me 
to arrive at four o'clock in the morning, if possible, as the 
servants would enjoy the hustle of someone arriving when it 
was still dark. 

One evening" we went out riding through the woods, and 
over the plains, and no sooner had we left the front door than 
my pony, altogether out of control, galloped away into space. 
One morning we were called at one, and went out to the marshes 
to shoot wild duck before the dawn. It was quite dark when 
we started, and after the shooting was over, and I shot two 
wild duck dead, we drove home in the dawn across the dewy 
plains, when the whole country was awakening, the cocks 
crowing and the birds singing, and the plains were bathed in 
lemon-coloured light, and faint pink and grey clouds hung 
like shreds from Aurora's scarf across the horizon. 

One night we camped out in the woods. We took bottles 
of beer and water-melons, and playing-cards, and a camera, 
and many rugs. We slept little ; the wood was full of flies 
and mosquitoes, but we enjoyed ourselves much all the same, 
and came back with that pleasant headache which is the 
result of sleeping on straw in the open air on a hot August 
night, and covered with bites. The morning after, we had a 
wolf-shoot, but it was too early in the year for wolves, and 
nobody saw one. But there was a great display, nevertheless ; 
a man rode on a white horse and blew a trumpet, and there 
were a multitude of beaters. I remember a short dialogue 
bawled slowly, quietly, and sonorously in prolonged accents 
across a whole field between Andre, the night-watchman, and 
Wassili, the keeper. " Who is that man yonder ? " asked 
Wassili. " He is a shepherd," said Andre; " he feeds sheep." 
" On pastukh, on past korov." It was so dignified, so slow, 
like a fragment of dialogue from the Old Testament. In the 
morning we used to have breakfast out of doors, in the garden, 
under a tree, with a pleasant after-breakfast interlude of smoking 



COPENHAGEN 223 

and conversation ; then Alexander and the gardener would 
stroll into the garden, and there would be endless discussion 
about the pulling down of some paling, or the repairing of some 
fence or chair, or the painting of some room or gate ; Alexander's 
volubility had no limit, and the gardener was extraordinarily 
ingenious in twisting the meaning of anything into the opposite 
of what had been said. We had luncheon at half-past twelve, 
and sat afterwards on the terrace, till the great heat was over, 
and then we would go out in the troika, and take tea and a 
samovar with us, or find a samovar somewhere, and perhaps 
bathe in the river. After dinner, when it was too cold to stay 
out, we would sit indoors and play cards at the green table, 
marking the score in chalk on the table ; and Pierre Bencken- 
dorff, who was not yet an officer, but still at the cadet college, 
used to read out Mark Twain in German, or draw pictures, 
or make me draw pictures, while he gave advice, or played 
the treble of tunes on the pianoforte. 

There were three little rooms on the ground floor of the 
first house, which was built of wood. The first room into which 
the small front hall led was Count Benckendorff's sitting-room. 
It had a writing-table ; a table where there was an array of 
long pipes, neatly arranged ; a round table with a green cloth 
on it, and a wooden cup and ball on a plate ; a bookcase full of 
books of reference, which were constantly consulted, whenever, 
as so often occurred, there was a family argument. In this 
room, near one of the windows, there was a deal drawing- 
table. There were prints on the wall. The next room had 
some old French wooden furniture painted with little flowers, 
and a large grand pianoforte, and a comfortable corner round 
the fireplace ; in front of a window, which went down to the 
ground and opened like a door, there was a stone terrace with 
orange trees in pots on it and agapanthus plants (later there 
were rose trees as well). Beyond this there was a third room 
full of books, old books, the library of Count Benckendorff's 
grandfather — the books that had been modern in the eighteenth 
century, in their dark brown calf bindings, and old marbled 
papers ; here was the newest edition of Byron in French, 
the poems of Pope and Corneille and Voltaire and Gresset, 
the letters of Madame de Sevigne, the memoirs of Madame 
de Caylus, Napoleonic memoirs and the poems of Ossian, 
Schiller's plays, and an early edition of Gogol. Upstairs on 



224 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

the landing, there was a cupboard full of every imaginable 
kind of novel : the Tauchnitz novels of many ages, and French 
novels of every description, the early Zolas, the early Feuillets, 
and Maupassant's first stories. Before going to bed, we would 
dive into that cupboard, and one was always sure, even in 
the dark, of finding something one could read. I have always 
thought since then, the ideal bookcase would be that in which 
you could plunge a hand into in the dark and be sure of ex- 
tracting something readable. In the stone-house, the boys 
had each of them a sitting-room on the ground floor, and I 
had a bedroom and sitting-room upstairs. Next to the school 
library at Eton, that sitting-room proved to be my favourite 
room in all the world and in all my life ; and at its big table 
I painted innumerable water-colours, and wrote four plays in 
verse, two plays in prose, three long books in prose, besides 
translating a book of Leonardo da Vinci and writing endless 
letters and newspaper articles. In this room, one had the 
1 feeling of the world forgetting by the world forgot, and one 
1 was recalled to reality by a bell, or by Alexander coming up 
to the room, as he always did, to say that tea was ready or 
dinner, or that the horses were at the door. 

I felt the charm of Russia directly I crossed the frontier ; 
and after a three weeks' stay there I was so bitten by it that 
I resolved firstly to learn Russian, and, secondly, to go back 
there as soon as I could. 

I went back to Copenhagen, and stopped some hours at 
Moscow on the way, and saw the Kremlin, and had some 
amusing adventures at Testoff's restaurant. Pierre Bencken- 
dorff had written down for me a list of things to ask for ; one 
of which was caviare, which in Russian is ikra. But when I 
said ikra the waiters thought I said igra, which means play, 
and merely turned on the great mechanical organ which that 
restaurant then boasted of, and I could not get any caviare. 

When I got back to Copenhagen, I at once had lessons in 
I Russian from the psalomtchtchik at the Russian Church. 

On the 19th of September, King Edward vn. arrived in Den- 
mark to pay his first visit to Denmark as King of England. 
The King was to arrive at Elsinore in the Osborne. The Staff of 
the Legation had received orders to go to Elsinore and meet 
His Majesty on board the yacht. His Majesty was to land in 
time to meet the King of Denmark, the Crown Prince and all 



COPENHAGEN 225 

the Danish Royal Family, the King of Greece, Queen Alexandra, 
the Emperor and Empress of Russia, the Dowager Empress of 
Russia, Prince and Princess Charles of Denmark, and other 
members of the various Royal Families. We were to go in 
uniform. The train started at eight. I have already said I was 
living at the Legation, but my rooms were completely isolated, 
from Sir Edward's house, and had no connection with them.. 
I had a Danish servant called Peter. He had been told to call 
me punctually at seven. He forgot, or overslept himself. I 
woke up by accident, and automatically, and found to my 
horror it was twenty-five minutes to eight, and the station was 
far off, and I had to dress in uniform. I dressed like lightning,, 
but it is not easy to dress like lightning in a diplomatic uniform ; 
the tight boots are a special difficulty. I had no time to shave. 
I got a cab, and we drove at full gallop to the station, and I got 
into Sir Edward's carriage as the train was moving out of the 
station. At Elsinore, we had fortunately some time to spare 
before going on board the Osborne, and I was able to get shaved 
in the village. Then we went on board and were presented to 
the King, and kissed his hand on his accession. 

That same night there was a banquet at the Palace of 
Fredensborg for the King, to which the staff of the Legation 
were invited. I remember only one thing about this dinner, 
and that is that we were given 1600 hock to drink. It was 
quite bitter, and had to be drunk with about five lumps of sugar 
in a glass. 

After dinner, we stood round a large room while the Kings, 
and Queens, the. Emperor and Empresses and Princesses, went 
round and talked to the guests ; and this was the end of a. 
tiring day. 

A few days later the King came to luncheon at the Legation- 
There was one other Royal arrival which I shall never 
forget. I cannot place its date, but I think it must have been 
Queen Alexandra's first visit as Queen to Copenhagen. But 
what I remember is this, that while we were waiting on the 
station platform, Queen Alexandra descended from the train 
all in black, with long floating veils, and threaded her way 
through the crowd of Royalties and officials, looking younger 
than anyone present, with still the same fairy-tale-like grace 
of carriage and movement that I remembered as a child, and 
with the same youthful smile of welcome, and with all her 
15 



226 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

delicacy of form and feature heightened by her mourning and 
her long black veils, whose floating intricacy were obedient and 
docile to the undefmable rhythm of her beauty, and I remember 
thinking of Donne's lines : 

" No spring, no summer beauty has such grace 
As I have seen in one autumnal face." 

I spent that Christmas at Copenhagen, and on the 7th of 
January 1902 a dispatch came to say I had been transferred 
from the post of a Third Secretary at His Majesty's Legation 
at Copenhagen to that of a Third Secretary of His Majesty's 
Embassy at Rome. Before I left Copenhagen I had finished 
an article on Taine, an article on modern French literature, and 
an article on Sully Prudhomme, for the new edition of the 
British Encyclopedia. 



CHAPTER XII 
SARAH BERNHARDT 

I SAID that Sarah Bernhardt should have a chapter to 
herself. 

" Les Comediens," said Jules Lemaitre, " tiennent 
beaucoup de place dans nos conversations et dans nos journaux 
parce qu'ils en tiennent beaucoup dans nos plaisirs." Amongst 
all the many pleasures I have experienced in the theatre, the 
acutest and greatest have been due to the art and genius of 
Sarah Bernhardt. Providence has always been generous and 
yet economical in the allotment of men and women of genius 
to a gaping world. Economical, because such appearances are 
rare ; generous, because every human being, to whatever 
generation he belongs, will probably, at least once during his 
lifetime, have the chance of watching the transit, or a phase 
of the transit, of a great comet. 

This is especially true of actors and actresses of genius. 
Their visits to the earth are rare, yet our forefathers had the 
privilege of seeing Mrs. Siddons and Garrick ; our fathers saw 
Rachel, Ristori, and Salvini ; and we shall be able to irritate 
younger generations, when they rave about their new idol, with 
reminiscences of Sarah Bernhardt. 

Sometimes, of course, as in this case, the comet shines 
through several generations. I have talked with people who 
have seen both Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, and with some 
who declared that in the first two acts of Phedre, Sarah Bern- 
hardt surpassed Rachel. Such was the opinion of that sensible 
and conservative critic, Francisque Sarcey. 

The actor's art dies with him ; but the rumour of it, when it 
is very great, lives on the tongue and sometimes in the soul of 
man, and forms a part of his dreams and of his visions. The great 
of old still rule our spirits from their urns ; and we, who never 
saw Rachel, get an idea of her genius from the accounts of her 



228 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

contemporaries, from Theodore deBanville and Charlotte Bronte. 
Her genius is a fact in the dreams of mankind ; just as the 
beauty of Helen of Troy and the charm of Mary Stuart, whom 
many generations of men fell in love with. So shall it be with 
Sarah Bernhardt. There will, it is to be hoped, be great actresses 
in the future — actresses filled with the Muses' madness and con- 
strained to enlarge rather than to interpret the masterpieces 
of the world ; but Providence (so economical, so generous !) 
never repeats an effect ; and there will never be another 
Sarah Bernhardt, just as there will never be another 
Heinrich Heine. Yet when the incredible moment comes for 
her to leave us, in a world that without her will be a duller 
and a greyer place, her name and the memory of her 
fame will live in the dreams of mankind. Sarah Bern- 
hardt delighted several generations, and there were many 
vicissitudes in her career and many sharp fluctuations in the 
appreciation she won from the critical both in France and 
abroad ; nor did her fame come suddenly with a rush, as it 
does to actors and actresses in novels. Even in Henry James* 
novel, The Tragic Muse, the development of the heroine's 
career and the establishment of her fame happens far too 
quickly to be real. Henry James was conscious of this himself. 
He mentions this flaw in the preface he wrote for the novel 
in the Collected Edition of his works. 

Sarah Bernhardt 's career shows no such easy and immediate 
leap into fame, nor is it the matter of a few star parts ; it 
was a series of long, difficult, laborious, and painful campaigns 
carried right on into old age (in spite of the loss of a limb), 
and right through a European war, during which she played 
in the trenches to the poilus ; it was a prolonged wrestle with 
the angel of art, in which the angel was defeated by an inflexible 
will and an inspired purpose. 

She made her debut at the Theatre francais in 1862, in the 
Iphigenie of Racine. Sarcey, writing of her performance, said : 

" Elle se tient bien et prononce avec une nettete parfaite. 
C'est tout ce qu'on peut dire en ce moment." It was not until 
ten years later that she achieved her first notable success in 
Le Passant, by Francois Coppee, and that she was hailed as 
a rising star as the Queen in Ruy Bias, at the Odeon, and 
became, in her own words, something more than " la petite fee 
des etudiants." 



SARAH BERNHARDT 229 

In 1872 she left the Odeon and entered the Theatre francais 
once more. She reappeared in Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle 1 with 
partial success. In writing of this performance, Sarcey expressed 
doubt of Sarah Bernhardt ever achieving power as well as grace, 
and strength as well as charm. " Je doute," he wrote, " que 
MademoiseUe Sarah Bernhardt trouve jamais dans son delicieux 
organe ces notes eclatantes et profondes, pour exprimer le 
paroxysme des passions violentes, qui transportent une salle. 
Si la nature lui avait donne ce don, elle serait une artiste com- 
plete, et il n'y en a pas de telles au theatre." 

It was during a performance of Voltaire's Zaire, on a stifling 
night in 1873, that Sarah Bernhardt discovered she had. 
undreamed-of stores of energy and electric power at her dis- 
posal, and under her control. She had rebelled against having 
to act during the summer months. Perrin, the director of the 
Theatre francais, had insisted. When the night came when 
she was due to appear in Zaire (August 6), she determined to 
exhaust all the power that was in her, and as she was at that 
time as frail as a sylph and was thought to be perilously 
delicate (spitting blood), she decided to spite Perrin by 
dying. She strained every nerve ; she cried in earnest ; she 
suffered in earnest ; she gave a cry of real pain when struck by 
the stage dagger ; and when it was all over she thought her last 
hour must have come ; and then she found to her amazement 
that she was quite fresh, and ready to begin the performance 
all over again. She realised then that her intellect and will 
could draw when they pleased on her physical resources ; and 
that she could do what she liked with her vocal chords. This ex- 
plains a secret that often puzzled the spectators of her art — her 
power of letting herself go, and after a violent explosion, just 
when you thought her voice must be broken for ever by the 
effort, of opening as it were another stop, and letting flow a 
ripple from a flute of the purest gold. 

It was in Phedre that Sarah Bernhardt proved she possessed 
not only grace but power ; her rendering of Dona Sol in 
Hernani (November 1877) definitely sealed her reputation, not 
only as a tragic actress, but as the incarnation of something 

1 Theodore de Banville apropos of this performance, said about 
Sarah Bernhardt : " Elle a recu la qualite d'etre toujours, et quoi qu'elle 
veuille faire, absolument et inconsciemment lyrique." Prophetic 
words ! 



230 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

new and exotic. And the world recognised her incomparable 
talent for speaking verse. 

In 1879, the Comedie francaise visited London, and all 
London went mad about Sarah Bernhardt. She was not then 
the star in a cast of mediocrities, she was a star in a dazzling 
firmament of stars. Her fellow actors and actresses were 
Coquelin, Got, Delaunay, Mounet Sully, Worms, Maubant, and 
Febvre among the men ; and among the women, Croizette, 
Baretta, Madeleine Brohan, Reichemberg, and Madame Favart. 
A more varied, excellent, and complete cast could not be im- 
agined. It was a faultless ensemble for tragedy and comedy, 
for Racine, for Moliere, for Victor Hugo, and for Alexandre 
Dumas fils. 

In 1880, the glory of this theatrical age of gold was eclipsed 
and diminished by the flight of Sarah Bernhardt. After a 
quarrel arising out of the performance of L'Aventuriere, she 
suddenly resigned, and, after a short season in London, in May 
1880, started for America. 

This rupture with the Theatre francais, which was largely 
due to the adulation she received and the sensation she made 
in London, was a momentous turning-point and break in her 
career. When it happened, the whole artistic world deplored 
it, and there are many critics in France and in England who 
never ceased to deplore it ; but a calm review of the whole 
career of Sarah Bernhardt forces one to the conclusion that it 
could not have been otherwise. 

The whole motto of her life was : ' ' Faire ce qu'on veut . ' ' And 
sometimes she added to this : " Lemieux est l'ennemi du bien." 

The Theatre francais at that time was indeed an ideal temple 
of art for so inspired a priestess. But Sarah Bernhardt was 
more than a priestess of art — she was a personality, a force, a 
power, which had to find full expression, its utmost limits and 
range ; and if we weigh the pros and cons of the matter, I do 
not think we have been the losers. Her art certainly did suffer 
at times from her travels and her unshackled freedom ; she 
played to ignorant audiences, and sometimes would walk through 
a part without acting ; she played in inferior plays. On the 
other hand, had she remained in the narrower confines of the 
Theatre francais, we should never have realised her capacities 
to the full. In fact, had she remained at the Theatre francais, 
she would not have been Sarah Bernhardt. We should have 



SARAH BERNHARDT 231 

lost as much as we should have gained. It is true we should 
never have seen her in plays that were utterly unworthy of her. 
On the other hand, we should never probably have seen her 
Dame aux Camelias, her Lorenzaccio, her Hamlet. We should 
never have had the series of plays that Sardou wrote for her : 
Fedora, Theodora, La Tosca, etc. Some will contend that this 
would have been a great advantage. But, despise Sardou as 
much as you like, the fact remains it needs a man of genius 
to write such plays, and not only a woman of genius, but Sarah 
Bernhardt and none other, to play in them. In Fedora, Eleonora 
Duse, the incomparable Duse, could not reach the audience. 
And now, when these plays are revived in London, we realise 
all too well, and the public realises too, that there is none who 
can act them. It is no use acting well in such plays ; you must 
act tremendously or not at all. La Tosca must be a violent 
shock to the nerves or nothing. When it was first produced, 
Jules Lemaitre, protesting against the play, said the main 
situation was so strong, so violent, and so horrible, that it was 
in the worst sense actor-proof, and so it seemed then. Now we 
know better ; we know by experience that without Sarah 
Bernhardt the play does not exist ; we know that what made 
it almost unbearable was not the situation, but the demeanour, 
the action, the passivity, the looks, the gestures, the moans, 
the cries of Sarah Bernhardt in that situation. Had Sardou's 
" machine-made " plays never been written, we should never 
have known one side of Sarah Bernhardt 's genius. I do not say 
it is the noblest side, but I do say that what we would have 
missed, and what Sardou's plays revealed, was an unparalleled 
manifestation of electric energy. 

The high-water mark of Sarah's poetical and intellectual 
art was probably reached in her Phedre, her Hamlet, and her 
Lorenzaccio ; but the furthest limits of the power of her power 
were revealed in Sardou's plays, for Sardou had the intuition to 
guess what forces lay in the deeps of her personality, and the 
insight and skill to make plays which, like subtle engines, should 
enable these forces to reveal themselves at their highest pitch, 
to find full expression, and to explode in a divine combustion. 

There is another thing to be said about Sarah Bernhardt 's 
emancipation from the Theatre francais. Had she never been 
independent, had she never been her own master and her own 
stage manager, she would never have realised for us a whole 



232 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

series of poetical visions and pictures which have had a deep 
and lasting influence on contemporary art. We should never 
have seen Theodora walk like one of Burne- Jones's dreams come 
to life amidst the splendours of the Byzantine Court : 

" Tenendo un giglio tra le ceree dita." 

We should never have seen La Princesse Lointaine crowned 
with lilies, sumptuous and sad, like one of Swinburne's early 
poems ; nor La Samaritaine evoke the spices, the fire, and the 
vehemence of the Song of Solomon ; nor Gismonda, with 
chrysanthemums in her hair, amidst the jewelled glow of the 
Middle Ages, against the background of the Acropolis ; nor 
Izeil incarnating the soul and dreams of India. Eliminate 
these things and you eliminate one of the sources of inspiration 
of modern art ; you take away something from D'Annunzio's 
poetry, from Maeterlinck's prose, from Moreau's pictures ; you 
destroy one of the mainsprings of Rostand's work ; you anni- 
hilate some of the colours of modern painting, and you stifle 
some of the notes of modern music ; for in all these you 
can trace in various degrees the subtle, unconscious influence 
of Sarah Bernhardt. 

The most serious break in the appreciation of her art, on 
the part of the critics and the French public, did not come 
about immediately after she left the Theatre francais. On the 
contrary, when she played the part of Adrienne Lecouvreur 
for the first time — this was in May 1880 — in London, her 
triumph among the critical was complete. I have an article 
by Sarcey, dated 31st May 1880, in which he raves about the 
performance he had come to London to see, and in which 
he says, had the performance taken place in Paris, the 
enthusiasm of the audience would have been boundless. The 
most serious break in the appreciation of her art came about 
after she had been to America, toured round Europe many 
times, with a repertory of stock plays and an indifferent com- 
pany, and acted in such complete rubbish as Lena, the adapta- 
tion of As in a Looking-Glass, of which I have already given a 
schoolboy's impressions. People then began to say they were 
tired of her. It is true she woke up the public once more with her 
performance of La Tosca in 1889, but in July 1889 Mr. Walkley 
voiced a general feeling when he said: "I suspect she her- 
self understands the risks of ' abounding in her own sense ' 



SARAH BERNHARDT 233 

quite as well as any of us could tell her. She knows her talent 
needs refreshing, revitalising, rejuvenating." He speaks of 
" her consciousness of a need for a larger, saner, more varied 
repertory. But," he adds, " she will never get that repertory 
so long as she goes wandering from pole to pole, with a new 
piece, specially constructed for her by M. Sardou, in her pocket." 

Fortunately this consciousness of a need for a newer, saner 
repertory took effect in fact, after Sarah Bernhardt came back 
from a prolonged tour in South America. In the 'nineties she 
took the Renaissance Theatre in Paris, and she opened her 
season with a delicate and serious drama called Les Rois, by 
Jules Lemaitre. 

I am not sure of the date of this performance, but she 
played Phedre at the Renaissance in 1893, and Lemaitre said 
that " Jamais, Madame Sarah Bernhardt, ne fut plus parfaite, 
ni plus puissante, ni plus adorable." She produced Sudermann's 
Magda in 1896, and Musset's Lorenzaccio in December 1896, 
and then she discovered Rostand, whose first play, Les Roman- 
esques, had been done at the Frangais, and turned him into the 
channel of serious poetical drama. 

She then built a theatre for herself, and gave us Rostand's 
Samaritaine, Hamlet, L'Aiglon, and a series of Classical matinees ; 
and from that time onward she never ceased to produce at least 
one interesting play a year. That was a fine average, a high 
achievement, and a real service to art. People seldom reflect 
that it is necessary for managers and actors to fill their theatre, 
and they cannot always be producing interesting experiments 
that do not pay. Small blame, therefore, to Sarah Bernhardt, 
if she sometimes fell back on Sardou, and all praise and 
gratitude is due to her for the daring experiments she risked. 

Among these experiments one of the most remarkable 
of all was that of Jeanne d'Arc in Le Proces de Jeanne 
d'Arc ; another was as Lucrezia Borgia in Victor Hugo's 
play ; and a third the hero of the charming poetical play Les 
Bouffons. She found a saner, larger repertory, and crowned 
her career by triumphing in Athalie in 1920. 

Some French critics think her Lorenzaccio was the finest 
of her parts. Lemaitre said about it ; " Elle n'a pas seule- 
ment joue, comme elle sait jouer, son role : elle l'a compose. 
Car il ne s'agissait plus ici de ces dames aux camelias, et de ces 
princesses lointaines, fort simples dans leur fond, et qu'elle a su 



234 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

nous rendre emouvantes et belles, presque sans reflexion et 
rien qu'en ecoutant son sublime instinct. A ce genie naturel 
de la diction et du geste expressifs, elle a su joindre cette fois,. 
comme lorsqu'elle joue Phedre (mais que Lorenzaccio etait plus 
difficile a penetrer !) la plus rare et la plus subtile intelligence." 

This is what M. J. de Tillet wrote about the performance in 
the Revue Bleue of December 1896 : 

" Cette fois c'a ete le vrai triomphe, sans restrictions et sans 
reserves. Je vous ai dit la semaine derniere qu'elle avait atteint, 
et presque depasse le sommet de l'art. Je viens de relire 
Lorenzaccio, et c'a ete une joie nouvelle, plus rassise et plus con- 
vaincue, de retrouver et d'evoquer ses intonations et ses gestes. 
Elle a donne la vie a ce personnage de Lorenzo, que personne 
n'avait ose aborder avant elle ; elle a maintenu, a travers toute 
la piece, ce caractere complexe et hesitant ; elle en a rendu 
toutes les nuances avec une verite et une profondeur singulieres. 
Admirable d'un bout a 1 'autre, sans precedes et sans ' deblayage/ 
sans exces et sans cris, elle nous a emus jusqu'au fond de l'ame^ 
par la simplicite et la justesse de sa diction, par Tart s,ouverain 
des attitudes et des gestes. Et, j 'insist e sur ce point, elle a 
donne au role tout entier, sans faiblesse et sans arret, une in- 
oubliable physionomie. Qu'elle parle ou quelle se taise, elle est 
Lorenzaccio des pieds a la tete, corps et ame ; elle ' vit ' son 
personnage, et elle le fait vivre pour nous. Le talent de Mme 
Sarah Bernhardt m'a parfois plus inquiete que charme. C'est 
une raison de plus pour que je repete aujourd'hui qu'eUe a atteint 
le sublime. Jamais, je n'ai rien vu, au theatre, qui egalat ce 
qu'elle a donne dans Lorenzaccio." 

In Mr. Bernard Shaw's collected dramatic criticism, 
Dramatic Opinions and Essays, there is an interesting chapter 
comparing the two artists in the part of Magda, in which he 
says that Duse's performance annihilated that of Sarah Bern- 
hardt for him. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that 
it did the same for everyone. I saw Sarah Bernhardt play the 
part superbly in Paris, and I saw Duse play the part superbly in 
London, and I should have said that Duse lent the character a 
nobility and a dignity that are not to be found in the text of 
the play, and that Sarah Bernhardt made of Magda what the 
author wanted her to be : a rather noisy, exuberant, vulgar, 
successful prima donna, a cabotine, not without genius, and 
with moments, when her human feelings were touched, of 



SARAH BERNHARDT 235 

greatness ; that she portrayed the ostentation of the actress, 
and the sudden intoxication of success and celebrity, with 
their attendant disillusions, on a talented middle-class German 
girl ; and, when the note called for it, the majesty of mother- 
hood, to perfection ; but let us assume that Duse in this part 
gave something more memorable, and the part certainly suited 
her temperament, her irony, her dignity, perhaps better than 
any other, and gave her a unique opportunity for self-expression, 
even at the cost of reality, and of the play. Let us go further, 
and say that in Dumas' La Femme de Claude Duse played the 
part of Cesarine, a Sarah Bernhardt part if ever there was one,, 
the part of a wicked, seductive woman ; and made of her 
creation in that part a trembling, quivering, living, vibrating 
thing ; an unforgettable study of vice and charm and deadly 
wickedness and lure, which Sarah Bernhardt never excelled. 
Even if we admit all this, the fact still remains that Sarah 
Bernhardt could play a poetic tragedy in a fashion beyond 
Duse's reach ; that she could play Phedre and Cleopatra and 
Dona Sol ; and that Duse, in the role of Cleopatra, dwindled 
and was overwhelmed by it. The critics forgot, when they 
compared the two artists, the glory of Sarah Bernhardt 's past, 
the extent of range of her present, the possibilities of her future ; 
her interpretations of Racine, of Victor Hugo ; her under- 
standing of poetry and verse ; they did not compare the whole 
art of Duse with the whole art of Sarah Bernhardt, and had 
they done so they would have at once realised the absurdity of 
doing such a thing — an absurdity as great as to compare Keats' 
poetry with Tolstoy's novels, or Burne- Jones with George Sand. 

The French critics were more discriminating, and anyone 
who has the curiosity to turn up what Lemaitre says of Duse in 
La Dame aux Camelias will find a subtle and discriminating 
contrast between the art of these two great actresses. Person- 
ally I am thankful to have seen them both, and to have 
thought each unapproachable in her own way. 

From 1893 to 1903 Sarah Bernhardt 's career broadened and 
shone in an Indian summer of maturity and glory, and it was 
during this period that she produced the most interesting plays 
of her repertory, and it was certainly during this period that 
she received from French criticism the highest meed of serious 
praise. But her career was by no means over in 1893. In 1920 
all the theatres in Paris closed one day, so that all the actors 



236 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

of Paris might see her play in Athalie ; and as I write she is 
still producing new plays. 

In what did the magic, the secret of Sarah Bernhardt con- 
sist ? The mainsprings of her life and her career were indomit- 
able determination, blent with a fine indifference to the opinion 
of the crowd, and a saving sense of proportion enabling her to 
keep a cool head and a just estimate of worldly fame amidst a 
tornado of praise, and sometimes in face of volleys of abuse. 
But as to the secret of her art, when one has said that Sarah 
Bernhardt worked like a slave until she attained a perfect 
mastery over the means at her disposal ; that her attitudes and 
gestures were a poem in themselves ; that if she played Phedre 
in dumb-show it would have been worth while going to see; 
and that if she played Dona Sol in the dark it would have been 
worth a pilgrimage to hear — when one has said this, one has 
said nearly all that can be put into words, and one has said 
nothing ; one has left out the most important part, and in 
fact everything that matters, because one has omitted her 
personality, a blend of gestures, look, voice, movement, in- 
tonation combined, and something else, the charm, the witchery, 
the spell which defy analysis. 

When as Cleopatra she approached Antony, saying : " Je 
suis la reine d'Egypte," the fate of empires, the dominion of 
the world, the lordship of Rome, could have no chance in the 
balance against five silver words and a smile, and we thought 
that the world would be well lost ; and we envied Antony his 
ruin and his doom. 

But this magic, this undefinable charm, is a thing which it 
is useless to write about. One must state its existence, and 
with a thought of pity for those who have not had the oppor- 
tunity of feeling it, and still more for those who are unable to 
feel it, pass on. There is no more to be said. It is impossible, 
too, to define the peculiar thrill that has convulsed an audience 
when Sarah rose to an inspired height of passion. When the 
spark fell in these Heaven-sent moments, she seemed to be 
carried away, and to carry us with her in a whirlwind from a 
crumbling world. It is fruitless to dwell at length on this 
theme, but I will recall some minor occasions on which the 
genius of Sarah Bernhardt worked miracles. 

I remember one such occasion in the autumn of 1899. The 
South African War had been declared, and a concert was being 



SARAH BERNHARDT 237 

held at the Ritz Hotel in aid of the British wounded. It was a 
raw and dark November afternoon. In the drawing-room of 
the Ritz Hotel there was gathered together a well-dressed and 
singularly uninspiring crowd, depressed by the gloomy news 
from the front, and suffering from anticipated boredom at the 
thoughts of an entertainment in the afternoon. Sarah Bern- 
hardt walked on to the platform dressed in furs, and prepared 
to recite " La Chanson d'Eviradnus," by Victor Hugo, and an 
accompanist sat down before the piano to accompany the recita- 
tion with music. I remember my heart sinking. I felt that 
a recitation to music of a love-song in that Ritz drawing-room 
on that dark afternoon, before a decorous, dispirited crowd, 
mostly stolid Britishers, was inappropriate ; I wished the whole 
entertainment would vanish ; I felt uncomfortable and I pitied 
Sarah from the bottom of my heart. Then Sarah opened her 
lips and began to speak the wonderful lyric (I quote for the 
pleasure of writing the words) : 

" Si tu veux faisons un reve, 
Montons sur deux palefrois ; 
Tu m'emmenes, je t'enleve, 
L'oiseau chante dans les bois. 

Je suis ton maitre et ta proie ; 
Partons, c'est la fin du jour ; 
Mon cheval sera la joie; 
Ton cheval sera l'amour." 

Ritz and the well-dressed crowd, and the raw November air, 
and the gloom of the war, the depression and the discomfort all 
disappeared. 

" Nous ferons toucher leurs tetes ; 

Les voyages sont aises ; 

Nous donnerons a ces betes 

Une avoine de baisers. 

Viens ! nos doux chevaux mensonges 
Frappent du pied tous les deux, 
Le mien au fond des songes 
Et le tien au fond des cieux. 

Un bagage est necessaire ; 
Nous emporterons nos vceux, 
Nos bonheurs, notre misere, 
Et la fleur de tes cheveux." 

We heard the champing of the steeds in an enchanted forest, 



238 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

the song of the calling bird, and the laughter of adventurous 

lovers. 

" Viens, le soir brunit les chenes, 
Le moineau rit ; ce moqueur 
Entend le doux bruit des chaines 
Que tu m'as mises au coeur. 

Ce ne sera point ma faute 
Si les forets et les monts, 
En nous voyons cote a cote, 
Ne murmurent pas : Aimons ! 

Viens, sois tendre, je suis ivre. 
O les verts taillis mouilles ! 
Ton soufle te fera suivre 
Des papillons reveilles." 

In the second line of the last stanza quoted : 

" O les verts taillis mouilles ! " 
her voice suddenly changed its key and passed, as it were, from 
a minor of tenderness to an abrupt major of childlike wonder or 
delighted awe ; it half broke into something between a sob of 
joy and a tearful smile ; we saw the dew-drenched grasses and 
the gleaming thickets, and then as she said the two next lines 
the surprise died away in mystery and an infinite homage : 

" Was it love or praise ? 
Speech half asleep or song half awake ? " 

And when further on in the poem she said : 

" Allons nous en par l'Autriche ! 
Nous aurons l'aube a nos fronts ; 
Je serai grand, et toi riche, 
Puisque nous nous aimerons," 

we heard the call of youth, the soaring of first love, the spirit 
of adventure, of romance, and of spring. When she came to 
the last stanza of all : 

" Tu sera dame, et moi comte ; 
Viens, mon cceur s'epanouit, 
Viens, nous conterons ce conte 
Aux etoiles de la nuit," 

she opened wide her raised arms, and one could have sworn 
a girl of eighteen, " April's lady," was calling to her " lord in 
May." 

When she had done, a great many people in the audience 
were crying ; the applause was deafening, and she had to say 



SARAH BERNHARDT 239 

the whole poem over a second time, which she did, with the 
same effect on the audience. 

Another occasion which I shall never forget was the first 
night that she played Hamlet in Paris. The audience was 
brilliant and hypercritical, and the play was received coldly 
until the first scene between Polonius and Hamlet. When 
Hamlet answers Polonius 's question : " What do you read, 
my Lord ? " with his " Words, words, words," Sarah Bern- 
hardt played it like this. (She was dressed and got up like 
the pictures of young Raphael, with a fair wig ; she was the 
soul of courtesy in the part, a gentle Prince.) Hamlet was 
lying on a chair reading a book. The first " des mots " he said 
with an absent-minded indifference, just as anyone speaks 
when interrupted by a bore ; in the second " des mots " his 
answer seemed to catch his own attention, and the third 
" des mots " was accompanied by a look, and charged with an 
intense but fugitive intention : something 

" between a smile and a smothered sigh," 

with a break in the intonation, that clearly said : " Yes, it is 
words, words, words, and all books and everything else in 
life and in the whole world is only words, words, words." 
This delicate shadow, this adumbration of a hint was in- 
stantly seized by the audience from the gallery to the stalls ; 
and the whole house cried : " Bravo ! bravo ! " It was a fine 
example of the receptivity, the flair, and the corporate in- 
telligence of a good French audience. 

Personally I think her Hamlet was one of the four greatest 
achievements of her career. I will come to the others later. 
With the exception of Sir Forbes Robertson's Hamlet, it was 
the only intelligible Hamlet of our time. One great point of 
difference between this Hamlet and that of any other actors 
I have seen is, whereas most Hamlets seem isolated from the 
rest of the players, as if they were reciting something apart 
from the play and speaking to the audience, this Hamlet spoke 
to the other persons of the play, shared their life, their external 
life, however wide the spiritual gulf might be between them and 
Hamlet. This Hamlet was in Denmark ; not in splendid isola- 
tion, on the boards, in order to show how well he could spout 
Shakespeare's monologues, or that he was an interesting fellow. 

Another point : her Hamlet is the only one I have seen in 



240 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

which there was real continuity, in which one scene seemed 
to have any connection with the preceding scenes. 

She had already shown what she could do in the progression 
of a single scene by crescendo, diminuendo transition, and 
modulation, in the dialogue with Ophelia — " Go to a nunnery."' 
The transition between the tenderness of " Nymph, in 
thy orisons be all my sins remembered," and the brutality 
of " I have heard of your paintings too, well enough," was 
made plausible by Hamlet catching sight of the King 
and Polonius in the arras — a piece of business recommended,. 
I think, by Coleridge ; but the naturalness and the progression 
of this scene were a marvel ; the profound gravity and bitter- 
ness with which she spoke the words : " I am myself indifferent 
honest : but I could accuse me of such things, that it were 
better my mother had not borne me : I am very proud, revenge- 
ful, ambitious." One seemed to be overhearing Shakespeare 
himself in a confessional when she said that speech, and the 
cynicism of the final words of the scene were whispered and 
hissed with a withering, blighting bitterness, her voice sinking 
to a swift whisper, as though all the utterance of the body 
has been exhausted, and these words were the cry of a broken 
heart. But an example of what I mean by the continuity of 
the interpretation is when the play within the play is finished, 
when Hamlet breaks up the whole entertainment by his startling 
behaviour. In that scene Sarah Bernhardt was like a tiger ; 
her glance transfixed and pierced through the King, and 
towards the end of the play within the play she crept across 
the stage and climbed up on to the high, raised, balconied dais 
on the right of the stage, from which he was looking on, and 
stared straight into his face with the accusing, questioning 
challenge of an avenging angel. But the point I want to make 
is this : when that scene is over, most players take the inter- 
view with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which follows im- 
mediately after it, as though nothing had happened. Not 
so Sarah Bernhardt ; during the whole of this interview she 
played in a manner which let you see that Hamlet was still 
trembling with excitement from what had happened im- 
mediately before ; and this not only brought out the irony 
and the point of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 's flat con- 
ventionality, but gave the audience the sharp sensation that 
they were face to face with life itself. So was it throughout 



SARAH BERNHARDT 241 

her Hamlet ; each scene depended on all the others ; and 
the various moods of the Dane succeeded one another, like 
clouds that chased one another but belonged to one sky, 
and not like separate slides of a magic lantern. 

The fight with Laertes was terribly natural ; the business 
of the exchange of swords, and the expression in Hamlet's 
eyes when he realised, and showed that he had realised, that 
one of the swords was poisoned and now in his hands, which,., 
in the hands of mediocre players, becomes so preposterously* 
extravagant, was tremendous. 

The whole performance was natural, easy, life-like, and- 
princely, and perhaps the most poignant scene of all, and what 
is the most poignant scene in the play, if it is well played, was 
the conversation with Horatio, just before the final duel when 
Hamlet says : " If it be not to come, it will be now." Sarah 
charged these words with a sense of doom, with the set 
courage that faces doom and with the underlying certainty 
of doom in spite of the courage that is there to meet it. It 
made one's blood run cold. 

Another occasion when Sarah Bernhardt 's acting seemed to 
me tremendous, was a performance of La Dame aux Camelias 
not long before the war. I had seen her play the part dozens 
of times, and during a space of twenty years both in Paris 
and in London. She was not well ; she was suffering from 
rheumatism ; the stage had to be marked out in chalk for her„ 
showing where she could stand up. She was too unwell to.< 
stand up for more than certain given moments. I went to 
see her with a Russian actress who had seen her play in St. 
Petersburg or Moscow, and not been able to endure her acting ; 
she had seen her walk through a part before an indifferent 
audience that wondered what her great reputation was founded 
on. We arrived late after the second act, and I went behind 
the scenes and talked to Sarah, and told her of this Russian 
actress. She played the last three acts in so moving and 
simple a manner, and the last act with such agonising poignancy 
and reserve that not only was my Russian friend in tears, 
but the actors on the stage cried so much that their tears dis- 
coloured their faces and made runnels in their grease paint. 

As we went away my Russian friend said to me that was 
the finest bit of acting she had ever seen or hoped to see again. 
Another time, I think it was 1896, I was present at a. 
16 



242 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

performance of Magda in Paris at the Renaissance Theatre by 
Sarah ; in her own phrase, le Dieu etait Id,, and I shall never 
forget the thrill that passed through the audience when Magda, 
at the thought of being separated from her child, let loose her 
passion, and spoke the elemental love of a mother defending 
her child. Here the advocatus Diaboli will chuckle and say- 
something about " tearing a passion to pieces." This was just 
what it was not. The tirade was concentrated and subdued, 
and it culminated in a whisper which had the vehemence of a 
whirlwind. The scene was interrupted by a spontaneous cry 
of applause. I have sometimes heard applause like this before 
and since, when Sarah Bernhardt has been acting, but I have 
never seen the art of any other actor or actress provoke so 
great and so loud a cry. 

I said Sarah Bernhardt 's Hamlet was one of the four great 
achievements of her career. These are what I think were the 
others : 

The greatest thing an actor or an actress can do is to create 
a poet. It used at one time to be said that Sarah Bernhardt 
had failed to do this. Yet the only really remarkable French 
dramatic poet of modern times, whose plays really moved and 
held the public, Edmond Rostand, was a creation of Sarah 
Bernhardt. The younger generation of his time, and some men 
of letters in France, but not all (Emile Faguet was a notable 
exception, and Jules Lemaitre writes of his art with great dis- 
crimination), used to despise the verse of Edmond Rostand. 
But whatever anyone can say about the literary value of his 
work, there is no doubt about its dramatic value. Rostand 
may or may not have been a great poet or even a great artist 
in verse, but that he was a great poetical dramatist was proved 
by the only '"possible test — that of the rapturous enthusiasm 
of his audience, wherever and in whatever language his plays 
are 'performed. Since Victor Hugo, he is the one writer of our 
time, and the only writer in this century in the whole of Europe, 
who made a direct and successful appeal to the public, to 
the public in all countries where his plays were performed, 
and stirred and delighted them to the depths of their being 
through the medium of dramatic poetry. Surely this is no 
mean achievement ; besides this, even among French critics, 
there are many who maintain that he is a genuine poet. Well, 
Sarah Bernhardt is in the main responsible for Rostand, for 



SARAH BERNHARDT 243 

had there been no Sarah there would have been no Princesse 
Lointaine, and no Cyrano (for it was Coquelin's delight in La 
Princesse Lointaine which made him ask Rostand for a play), 
no Samaritaine, and no L'Aiglon. 

This is one of the achievements of Sarah Bernhardt. An- 
other and perhaps a more important achievement was accom- 
plished before this — her resuscitation of Racine. Let everyone 
interested in this question get M. Emile Faguet's Propos de 
Theatre. M. Faguet shows with great wealth of detail and 
abundance of contemporary evidence that in the 'seventies, 
until Sarah Bernhardt played in Andromaque and Phedre, 
Racine's plays were thought unsuited for dramatic representa- 
tion. Even Sarcey used to say in those days that Racine was 
not un homme de theatre. Sarah Bernhardt changed all this. 
She revealed the beauties of Racine to her contemporaries. She 
put new life into his plays, and by her incomparable delivery 
she showed off, as no one else can hope to do, the various and 
subtle secrets of Racine's verse. 

She did the same for Victor Hugo when she played Dona Sol 
and the Queen in Ruy Bias. Theodore de Banville, in his 
Camees Parisiens, says there could never be another Queen in 
Ruy Bias like Sarah, and that, whenever the words : 

" Elle avait un petit diademe en dentelle d'argent " 

are spoken, the vision of Sarah Bernhardt will rise, as though it 
were that of a real person, frail, slender, with a small crown 
set in her wonderful hair. 

Yet, when all is said and done, Sarah Bernhardt's supreme 
achievement is another and a fourth : her Phedre. I do not 
think that anyone will disagree with this. It was in Phedre 
that she gave the maximum of beauty, and exhibited the whole 
range of her highest artistic qualities. In Phedre her movements 
and her gestures, her explosions of fury and her outbursts of 
passion, were subservient to a commanding rhythm ; from the 
moment PhSdre walked on to the stage trembling under the 
load of her unconfessed passion until the moment she descended 
into Hades, par un chemin plus lent, the spectator witnessed 
the building up of a miraculous piece of architecture, in time 
and not in space ; and followed the progressions, the rise, the 
crisis, and the tranquil close of a mysterious symphony. More- 
over, a window was opened for him wide on to the enchanted 



244 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

land : the realm of beauty in which there are no conflicts of 
times and fashions, but in which all who bear the torch have 
an equal inheritance. He saw a woman speaking the precise, 
stately, and musical language of the court of Louis xiv., who, 
by her utterance, the plastic beauty of her attitudes, and the 
rhythm of her movements, opened the gates of time, and beyond 
the veil of the seventeenth century evoked the vision of ancient 
Greece. Or, rather, time was annihilated, seventeenth-century 
France and ancient Greece, Versailles and Trezene, were merged 
into one ; he was face to face with involuntary passion and the 
unequal struggle between it and reluctant conscience. 

There was the unwilling prey of the goddess, " a lily on her 
brow with anguish moist and fever dew " ; but at the sound 
of her voice and the music of her grief, perhaps we forgot all 
this, perhaps we forgot the ancient tales of Greece, and Crete, 
we forgot Racine and Versailles ; perhaps we thought only of the 
woman that was there before us, who surely was something more 
than human : was it she who plied the golden loom in the 
island of JEsea. and made Ulysses swerve in mid-ocean from his 
goal ? Or she who sailed down the Cydnus and revelled with 
Mark Antony ? Or she for whom Geoffroy Rudel sailed to Tri- 
poli, and sang and died ? Or she who haunted the vision but 
baffled the pencil of Leonardo da Vinci ? Or she who excelled 
" all women in the magic of her locks," and beckoned to Faust 
on the Brocken ? She was something of all these things, an 
incarnation of the spirit that, in all times and in all countries, 
whether she be called Lilith or Lamia or La Gioconda, in the 
semblance of a " Belle Dame sans Merci," bewitches the heart 
and binds the brain of man with a spell, and makes the world 
seem a dark and empty place without her, and Death for her 
sake and in her sight a joyous thing. 

So used we to dream when we saw those harmonious gestures 
and heard that matchless utterance. Then the curtain fell, 
and we remembered that it was only a play, and that even 
Sarah Bernhardt must " fare as other Empresses," and " wane 
with enforc'd and necessary change." 

Nevertheless, we give thanks — we that have lived in her day ;. 
for, whatever the future may bring, there will never be another 
Sarah Bernhardt : 

" Yea, they shall say, earth's womb has borne in vain 
New things, and never this best thing again." 



CHAPTER XIII 
ROME 

I ARRIVED in Rome, after staying a few days on the way 
in London and in Florence. In the Drury Lane Panto- 
mime that year, I think it was Mother Goose, Dan 
Leno played a harp solo, which I think is the funniest thing 
I ever saw on the stage. He had a subtle, early Victorian, 
Byronic way of playing, refined and panic-stricken, and he 
played with a keepsake expression, and with sensibility, as 
though he might suddenly have the vapours ; he became 
confused and entangled with the pedals, and at one moment 
the harp — and it was a gigantic harp — fell right on to him. 

Rome in January was warm ; one seldom needed more 
than a small wood fire. I had rooms at the Embassy at the 
Porta Pia. The Embassy garden is just within the old walls 
and is a trap of sun and beauty. The Ambassador was Lord 
Currie. Lady Currie, his wife, was Violet Fane, the authoress 
of Edwin and Angelina, and of a most amusing novel called 
Sophy, or the Adventures of a Savage, as well as of many books 
of poems. 

The First Secretary was Rennell Rodd. Lord Currie was 
not well, but he entertained a great deal. 

Shortly after I arrived, Madame Ristori celebrated her 
eightieth or her eighty-fifth birthday, and the Ambassador 
asked me to write her a letter of congratulation in French. I 
did it, and at the end I said that Lord Currie hoped to be able 
to send her birthday greetings for many more years to come. 
I forget the exact phrase, but I know the words de longues 
annees occurred, and Lord Currie said to me : " Don't you 
think it is perhaps a little excessive to talk of de longues 
annees to a lady of eighty ? " The expression was slightly 
toned down. 

A few days later Mrs. Crawshay took me to see Madame 



246 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Ristori. She was a stately old lady with white hair and a 
beautiful voice, and I imagine Mrs. Siddons must have been 
rather the same kind of person. She talked of D'Annunzio 
making a dramatic version of Paolo and Francesca ; whether 
he had done so then or not, or whether he had only announced 
his intention of doing so, I forget. In any case Madame Ristori 
disapproved of the idea. She said Dante had said all there 
was to say, and then she repeated the six crucial lines from 
the Inferno about the disiato riso, and I never heard a more 
melodious human utterance. 

Talking of some other poetical play, she asked whether it was 
a tragedy or not. As we seemed to hesitate, she said : " If it's 
in five acts, it's a tragedy ; if it's in four acts, it's a drama." 

The beauty of Rome pierced me like an arrow the first day 
I spent there. On my first afternoon I drove to St. Peter's, 
the Coliseum, the Pincio, and the Protestant cemetery, where 
Shelley and Keats are buried. I was not disappointed. A few 
days later I drove along the Appian Way into the Campagna. 
It was a grey day, with a slight silver fringe on the blue hills, 
and alone in the desolate majesty of the plain, a shepherd tootled 
a melancholy tune on the flute, as sad as the shepherd's tune in 
the third act of Tristan und Isolda. As we drove back, St. 
Peter's shone in a gleam of watery light, and I felt that I had 
now seen Rome. 

It was a pleasant Embassy to serve at. Diplomatic life 
was different at Rome either from life in Paris or Copenhagen. 
Society consisted of a number of small and separate circles 
that revolved independently of each other, but in which the 
members of one circle knew what the members of all the 
other circles were doing. The diplomats, and there were a 
great number of them, were most of them an integral part of 
Roman society, and there were also many literary and artistic 
people whose circles formed part of the same system as that of 
the Romans and of the diplomatic world. 

Lady Currie lived in a world of her own. She seemed to 
look on at the rest of the world from a detached and separate 
observation post, from which she quietly noted and enjoyed 
the doings of others with infinite humour and serious eyes. 

She had a quiet, plaintive, half -deprecating way of saying 
the slyest and sometimes the most enormous things. She left 
it to you to take them or leave them as you chose. One day 



ROME 247 

in the Embassy garden the servants had surrounded a scorpion 
with a ring of fire to see whether, as the legend says, it would 
stab itself to death. " Leave the poor salamander alone," said 
Lady Currie ; "it's not its fault that it is a salamander. If it 
had its way it might have been an . . . ambassador." 

To have luncheon or dinner alone with her and Lord Currie 
was one of the most enjoyable entertainments in the world, 
when she would talk in the most unrestrained manner, and 
with gentle flashes of the slyest, the most cunning wit, and a 
deliciously funny seemingly careless but carefully chosen 
felicity of phrase. 

She used to describe her extraordinary childhood and up- 
bringing, which is depicted in The Adventures of Sophy, and 
her early adventures in London ; and when she said any- 
thing particularly funny, she looked as if she was quite uncon- 
scious of the meaning of what she had said, as if it had been 
an accident. She was fond of poetry and used to read it aloud 
beautifully. She was equally fond of her dogs, and she made 
splendid use of them as a weapon against bores ; by bringing 
them into the conversation, making them the subject of mock- 
serious and sentimental rhapsodies, dialogues, monologues, and 
dramas, and just when the stranger would be thinking, " What 
a silly woman this is," there would be a harmless phrase, perhaps 
only one innocent word, which just gave that person a tiny 
qualm of doubt as to whether perhaps she was so silly after all. 
Once when she was travelling to London at the time the re- 
strictions against bringing dogs into England were first applied, 
she tried to smuggle her dog away without declaring its presence. 
The dog was detected, and there was some official who played 
a part in this story and in taking away her dog, whom Lady 
Currie said she would never forget. Lady Currie had a Turkish 
maid who had told her of a Turkish curse which, if spoken at 
an open window, had an unpleasant effect on the person against 
whom you directed it. She directed the curse against the man 
whom she considered to be responsible for depriving her of the 
dog. The next morning she was surprised and not a little 
startled to read in the Times the death of this public official. 
She told me this story in London in 1904. 

I went on with my Russian lessons in Rome, and I got 
to know a good many Russians, among others M. and Mme 
Sazonoff, Princess Bariatinsky, and her two daughters, and a 



248 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

brilliant old lady called Princess Ourousoff, who lived in a 
little flat and received almost every evening. 

Princess Ourousoff had known Tolstoy and been an intimate 
friend of Tourgenev. She was immensely kind to me and 
contributed greatly to my education in Russian literature. 
She read me poems by Pushkin and introduced me to the prose 
and verse of many other Russian authors. Herr Jagow was at 
the German Embassy at this time, and he, too, was a friend of 
Princess Ourousoff's. So there were at Rome at this time two 
future Ministers of Foreign Affairs, both of whom were destined 
to play a part in the war : Herr Jagow and M. Sazonoff . 

Among the Italians, my greatest friends were Count and 
Countess Pasolini, who had charming rooms in the Palazzo 
Sciarra. Count Pasolini was an historian and the author of 
a large, serious, and valuable work on Catherina Sforza. His 
ways and his conversation reminded me of Hamlet. His 
dignity and his high courtesy were mixed with the most impish 
humour, and sometimes he would glide from the room like a 
ghost, or suddenly expose some curious train of thought quite 
unconnected with the conversation that was going on round 
him. Sometimes he would be unconscious of the numerous 
guests in the room, which was nearly always full of visitors 
from every part of Europe; or he would startle a stranger 
by asking him what he thought of Countess Pasolini, or, if the 
conversation bored him, hum to himself a snatch of Dante. 
Sometimes he would be as naughty as a child, especially if he 
knew he was expected to be especially good, or he would say 
a bitingly ironical thing masked with deference. 

One day an Austrian lady came to luncheon who had rather 
a strange appearance and still stranger clothes. Her hair was 
remarkable for its high lights, her cheeks and eyebrows for their 
frank, undisguised artificiality. When the lift porter saw her 
he was puzzled. Her costume enhanced the singularity of her 
appearance, as she was dressed in pale green, with mermaid- 
like effects, and details of shells and seaweed. When she was 
ushered into the drawing-room, Pasolini gazed at her with 
delighted wonder, concealing his amazement with a veil of 
mock admiration, quite sufficiently to hide it from her, but 
not well enough to conceal it from those who knew him in- 
timately. She sat next to him at luncheon, and he was as 
charming and deferential as it was possible to be ; but those 



ROME 249 

who knew him well saw that he was taking a cynical enjoy- 
ment in every moment of the conversation. When she went 
away he bowed low, kissed her hand, and said : " Madame, je 
tacherai de vous oublier." 

Count Pasolini sometimes used to remind me of the fan- 
tastic, charming, cultivated, slightly eccentric people that 
Anatole France sometimes allows to wander and discourse 
through his stories, especially in his early books. Those who 
knew him used often to say if only he could meet Anatole 
France, and if only Anatole France could meet him. When 
the meeting did come off, at a dinner-party, the result was not 
quite successful. Count Pasolini knew what was expected of 
him, and looking at Anatole France, who was sitting on the 
other side of the table, he said to his neighbour in an audible 
whisper : " Qui est ce Monsieur un peu chauve ? " 

One day I took an English lady to tea with him, and he was 
so enchanted with her beauty and wit that he said he must have 
a souvenir of her, and quite suddenly he cut off a lock of her 
hair with a pair of scissors ; and this lock he kept in his museum, 
and he showed it to me years afterwards. His eyes were re- 
markable, they were so thoughtful, so wistful, so deep, so 
piercing, and so melancholy ; and sometimes you felt he was 
not there at all, but on some other plane, pursuing a fantasy, or 
chasing a dream or a thought, and all at once he would gently 
let you into the secret of his day-dream by a sudden question 
or an unexpected quotation. At other times he would join 
hotly in the fray of conversation ; dispute, argue, pour out 
fantastic monologues, and embroider absurd themes. 

But whatever he said or did, in whatever mood he was, 
whether wistful, combative, naughty, perverse, lyrical, or 
fantastic, he never lost his silvery courtesy, his melancholy 
dignity. When I said he was like Hamlet, I can imagine him 
so well looking at a skull and saying : " Prithee, Horatio, 
tell me one thing. Dost think Alexander looked o' this fashion 
i' the earth ? '• That is just the kind of remark he would 
suddenly make in the middle of a dinner-party. His thoughts 
and his dreams flitted about him like dragon-flies, and he some- 
times caught them for you and let you have a fugitive glimpse of 
their shining wings. 

At Rome I got to know Brewster very well. He lived in 
the Palazzo Antici Mattei, and he often gave luncheon and 



250 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

dinner-parties. I often dined with him when he was alone. 
His external attitude was one of unruffled serenity and 
Olympian impartiality, but I often used to tell him that this 
mask of suavity concealed opinions and prejudices as absolute 
as those of Dr. Johnson. His opinions and tastes were his own, 
and his appreciations were as sensitive as his expression of 
them was original. He had the serene, rarefied, smiling melan- 
choly of great wisdom, without a trace of bitterness. He took 
people as they were, and had no wish to change or reform them. 
He was catholic in his taste for people, and liked those with 
whom he could be comfortable. He was appreciative of the 
work of others when he liked it, a discriminating and inspiriting 
critic. While I was in Rome, he published his French book, 
L'Ame paienne ; but his most characteristic book is probably 
The Prison. Some day I feel sure that book will be republished, 
and perhaps find many readers ; it is like a quiet tower hidden 
in the side street of a loud city, that few people hear of, and many 
pass by without noticing, but which those who visit find to be 
a place of peace, haunted by echoes, and looking out on sights 
that have a quality and price above and beyond those of the 
market-place. 

Besides The Prison, Brewster wrote two other books in 
English, and a play in French verse, which he had not finished 
correcting when he died. 

Few people had heard of his books. He used never to 
complain of this. He once told me that his work lay in a 
narrow and arid groove, that of metaphysical speculation, in 
which necessarily but few people were interested. He talked 
of it as a narrow strip of stiff ploughland on which just a few 
people laboured. He said he would have far preferred a different 
soil, and a more fruitful form of labour, but that happened to 
be the only work he could do, the soil which had been allotted 
him. He was Latin by taste, tradition, and education ; a lover 
of Rabelais, Montaigne, Ronsard, and Villon, but seventh- 
century French classics bored him. He disputed the idea that 
French was necessarily a languagewhich necessitated perspicuity 
of expression and clearness of thought. He thought that in 
the hands of a poet like Verlaine the French language could 
achieve all possible effects of vagueness, of shades of feeling*, 
of overtones in ideas and in expression. He admired Dante, 
Goethe, Byron, and Keats, but not Milton, Wordsworth, or 



ROME 251 

Shelley. He disliked Wagner's music intensely, which had, he 
said, the same effect on him as the noise of a finger rubbed 
round the edge of a piece of glass, and he said that he could 
gauge from the intensity of his dislike how keen the enjoy- 
ment of those who did enjoy it must be. 

In 1906, discussing the revolutionary troubles of Russia, he 
said to me : " All Europe seems bent on proving that Liberty 
is the tyranny of the rabble. The equation may work itself 
out more or less quickly, but it is bound to triumph." And 
again : "As the intelligent are liberals, I am on the side of the 
idiots." And in Rome he often used to say to me that the 
fanaticism of free-thinkers and the intolerance of anti-clericals 
was to him not only more distasteful than the dogmatism of the 
orthodox, but appeared to him to be a more violent and a more 
tyrannous thing. 

This description (in a letter written in 1903) of how he 
discovered Verlaine's poetry is extremely characteristic : 

" In 1870 or '71 I found in the galeries of the Odeon a 
little plaquette — a few rough pages of verse. Nobody that 
knew had ever heard of the author, and it was years before I 
saw his name mentioned in the Press, or heard him talked of. 
But I had stored the name in my memory as that of a great 
poet. It was Verlaine. . . . Perhaps Verlaine's friends told 
him that his verse was doubtless pretty, but that he had better 
write plays for the Gymnase. Certainly they never made him 
rich, and it is a chance, a mere chance, that he did not die 
unknown. If he had, it wouldn't have harmed him. He had 
touched his full salary the moment he wrote them. I don't 
believe garlands ever fall on the poet's head. They collect 
round the neck of his ghost which stands in front of him, or 
behind. And the ghost bows and smiles or struts, and it [is 
all so indifferent and so far-off to the other fellow, who sits, 
like Verlaine, strumming rhythms on the table of a dirty 
little cafe." 

He believed in treating Shakespeare's plays like opera, and 
paying the greatest importance to the bravura passages. He 
deplored Shakespeare being the victim of pedants and a national 
institution. He saw in Shakespeare the Renaissance poet and 
nothing else. He thought that any kind of realism was as out 
of place in Shakespeare as in the libretto of an opera ; that 
dramatic poems were not plausible things, nor exhibitions of 



252 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

real people, and that bravura passages, however absurd their 
occurrence in a particular context, looked at from the point 
of view of reality, were not only legitimate, but came with 
authority if considered as lovely arias, duets, or concerted 
pieces. 

This view of the production of Shakespeare is now widely 
held, though unfortunately it is seldom practised ; managers 
and players still try to make Shakespeare realistic, and too 
often succeed in smothering his plays with scenery, business, 
and acting. 

The most refreshing thing about Brewster was that he was 
altogether without that exaggerated reverence for culture in 
general and books in particular that sometimes hampers his 
countrymen (he was an American) when they have been trans- 
planted early into Europe and brought up in France, Italy, or 
England, and saturated with art and literature. He liked 
books ; he enjoyed plays, poetry, and certain kinds of music ; 
but he didn't think these things were a matter of life and death. 
He enjoyed them as factors in life, an adjunct, an accompani- 
ment, an interlude, just as he enjoyed a fine day ; but he was 
never solemn and never pompous, and he knew how much and 
how little things mattered. He liked people for what they 
were, and not for what they did, or for what they achieved. 
The important thing in his eyes was not the quantity of achieve- 
ment, or the amount of effort, but the quality of the life lived. 
With such ideas he was as detached from the modern world as a 
Chinese poet or sage, not from the modern world, but rather 
from the world, for to the human beings who lived in it there 
never can have been a moment when the world was not 
modern, even in the Stone Age ; and in the game of life he 
strove for no prize ; the game itself was to him its own 
reward. 

In The Prison he writes : " There is a greater reward than 
any which the teachers can warrant ; they might teach you to 
lead a decorous life, help you to learn the rules of the game, show 
you how to succeed in it. But the profit of the game itself, 
that which makes it worth playing at all, even to those who 
succeed best, this they can neither grant nor refuse ; you bear 
it in yourselves, inalienably, whether you succeed or fail." 

I imagine that a man like Dr. Johnson might have said 
severe things about him, and I once heard a critic (who 



ROME 253 

admired and appreciated him) say it was a pity Brewster was 
such an idle and ignorant man. But his ignorance was more 
suggestive than the knowledge of others, for he ignored not 
what he was unable to learn, but what he had no wish to learn, 
and his idleness was a benefit to others as well as to himself : 
a fertile oasis in an arid country. His mind had the message 
of the flowers that need neither to toil nor to spin. 

In February 1902 Pope Leo the Thirteenth celebrated his 
jubilee. I heard him officiate at Mass at the Sixtine Chapel, 
and I also went — although I forget if this was later or not — 
to High Mass at St. Peter's, when the Pope was carried in on his 
chair and blessed the crowd. I had a place under the dome. 
At the elevation of the Host the Papal Guard went down on 
one knee, and their halberds struck the marble floor with one 
sharp, thunderous rap, and presently the silver trumpets rang 
out in the dome. At that moment I looked up and my eye 
caught the inscription, written in large letters all round it : 
" Tu es Petrus," and I reflected the prophecy had certainly 
received a most substantial and concrete fulfilment. Not that 
at that time I felt any sympathy with the Catholic Church ; 
indeed, it might not have existed for me at Rome at that time. 
I thought, too, that the English Catholic inhabitants of Rome 
were on the look out for converts, and were busy casting their 
nets. Of this, however, I saw no trace, although I met several 
of them at various times. 

But that ceremony in St. Peter's would have impressed any- 
one. And when the Pope was carried through St. Peter's, with 
his cortege of fan-bearers, and rose from his chair and blessed 
the crowd with a sweeping, regal, all-embracing gesture, the 
solemnity and the majesty of the spectacle were indescribable, 
especially as the pallor of the Pope's face seemed transparent, 
as if the veil of flesh between himself and the other world had 
been refined and attenuated to the utmost and to an almost 
unearthly limit. 

During Holy Week I attended some of the ceremonies at St. 
Peter's, and I think what impressed me most was the blessing of 
the oils on Maundy Thursday, and the washing of the altar, when 
that great church is full of fragrant sacrificial smells of wine 
and myrrh, and when the vastness of the crowd suddenly brings 
home to you the immense size of the building which the scale 
of the ornamentation dwarfs to the eye. 



254 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

In May I went to Greece in a yacht belonging to Madame 
de Beam. There were on board besides myself two Austrians 
and a German Professor called Krumbacher. We started from 
Naples and landed somewhere on the west coast, and went 
straight to Olympia. As we landed we were met by a sight 
which might have come straight from the Greek anthology : a 
fisherman spearing some little silver fishes with a wooden 
trident, and wading in the transparent water ; and that water 
had the colour of a transparent chrysoprase — more transparent 
and deeper than a turquoise, brighter and greener than a 
chrysoprase. Olympia was carpeted with flowers, and the 
fields were like Persian carpets : white and mauve and purple, 
with the dark blood-red poppies flung on the bright green corn. 
At every turn sights met you that might have been illustrations 
to Greek poems : a woman with a spindle ; a child with an 
amphora on its head. The air was the most iridescent I have 
ever seen. At sunset time it was as if it was powdered with 
the dust of a million diamonds, and in the background were 
the wonderful blue mountains, and against the sky the small 
shapes of the trees. 

At Olympia, in the museum, the only intact or nearly intact 
masterpiece of one of the great Greek sculptors has a little 
museum to itself : the Hermes of Praxiteles. There are still 
traces, faint traces, of the pink colour on some parts of the limbs, 
and even of faded gilding. The marble has the texture and 
ripple of live flesh ; the statue is different in kind from all the 
statues in the Vatican, the Capitol, or the Naples Museum, and 
to see it is to have one of those impressions that are like shocks 
and take the breath away, and leave one stunned with admira- 
tion, wonder, and awe. 

From Olympia we went to tragic heights and rocks of Delphi, 
where we saw the bronze statue of the charioteer, so magnificent 
in its effect and in its simplicity, and so startling in its trueness 
to the coachman type, for the face might be that of a hansom- 
cab driver ; and from Delphi to Corinth and Athens. The first 
sight of the Acropolis and the Parthenon takes the breath away ; 
the Parthenon is so much larger than one expects it to be ; and 
the colour of the pillars is not white, but a tawny amber, as though 
the marble had been changed to gold. In the evening these 
pillars stand like large ghosts against the purple hills, that are 
dry, arid, like a volcanic crust. In the distance you see the 



ROME 255 

blue ocean. And Byron's lines, with which the " Curse of 
Minerva " opens : 

" Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run, 
Along Morea's hills, the setting sun ; " 

describe exactly what you see. Byron is by far the most satis- 
factory singer of Greece, for he wrote with his eye on the spot, 
and there is something in his verse of the exhilarating and in- 
candescent quality of the Greek air ; something of the fiery 
strength of the Greek soil, and of the golden warmth of the 
Greek marbles. 

And next to Byron in this business I should put a widely 
different poet, Heredias ; but they both seize on the character- 
istic things in Greek landscape ; Byron, when he says : 

" Yet these proud pillars claim no passing sigh, 
Unmoved the Moslem sits, the light Greek carols by," 

perhaps even more than Heredias, when he writes : 

" Je suis ne libre au fond du golfe aux belles lignes, 
Ou l'Hybla plein de miel mire ses bleus sommets." 

An architect once pointed out to me that one of the most 
striking instances of the Greek fastidiousness in matters of art 
is to be found in the pavement of the Parthenon, which is not 
quite flat, but which is made on a slight curved incline, so that 
the effect of perfect flatness to the eye should be complete. 
The curve cannot be detected unless the measurements are 
taken, showing, as the architect said to me, that the Greeks 
aimed at the maximum of effect with the minimum of 
advertisement. 

While I was at Athens there was a scaffolding on the pedi- 
ment of the Parthenon. One could climb up and examine in 
detail the marbles spared by Lord Elgin, the wonderful horses 
and men which were wrought in the workshop of Phedias. I 
bought photographs of all this part of the frieze, and I used to 
have them later in my little house in London, which made my 
servant, who had been in the 10th Hussars, remark to a lady 
who was doing some typing for me, that there were some very 
rum pictures in the house. 

From Athens we went to Sunium, the whitest and most 
beautifully placed of the temples, and thence to the Greek 



256 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

islands — Scyra, Delos, and Paros. The skipper of the yacht, 
who was like one of Jacobs' characters, made an elaborate, 
plan for taking in Professor Krumbacher, whom he used to call 
" Crumb-basket." We were to go to Rhodes later, and the 
skipper, by misleading him on the chart, led him to think the 
yacht was arriving at Rhodes when in reality we were arriving 
at Candia in Crete. The Professor believed him so absolutely- 
and greeted the pretended Rhodes with such certainty of 
recognition that it was difficult to undeceive him. I had to leave 
the expedition at Scyra, to get back to Rome, which I did by 
taking a passage in the only available steamer, a small, rickety,, 
and extremely unreliable-looking craft, like a tin toy-boat. 
It was bound for some port not far from the Piraeus. It had. 
no accommodation to speak of, and it was overloaded with 
soldiers and with sheep, and both the sheep and the soldiers 
were sea-sick without stopping. 

It was a rough passage and lasted all night and all the next 
morning. I stood on the little bridge the whole time, which. 
was the only place where there was space to breathe. I was 
deposited somewhere on the coast, where the only train had 
left for Athens. A tramp steamer called later, which was going" 
on to the Piraeus, and I got a passage in that. I stayed two 
more days in Athens by myself. One afternoon while I was at 
the Acropolis I met a peasant and had a little talk with him.. 
I had with me in a little book Sappho's " Ode to Aphrodite," 
and I asked him to read it aloud, which he did, remarking that 
it was in patois. 

I went back to Rome by Corfu, where I stopped to see the- 
Todten-Insel and the complicated classical villa of the German- 
Emperor. 

As the summer progressed, I went for one or two delightful 
expeditions in the environs of Rome. One was to Limfa, which 
I think is the most magical spot I have ever seen. A deserted 
castle rises from a lake, which is entirely filled with water- 
lilies, tangled weeds, and green leaves. It was deserted owing 
to the malaria that infested it, but it is difficult to imagine it 
haunted by anything except fairies or water-nymphs. 

In Rome itself I often went for walks with Vernon Lee. She 
used to stay with Countess Pasolini, and take me to see out- 
of-the-way sights and places rich with peculiar association. I 
remember on one walk passing a little low wall by a stream, with? 



ROME 257 

an image of a river god, which she said might have been the 
demarcation between two small kingdoms, the kind of limit that 
divided the kingdoms of Romulus and Remus ; one after- 
noon we went to the Pincio, and in the walks and trees of that 
enchanted garden we spoke of the past and the future and built 
castles in the air, or smoked what Balzac called enchanted 
cigarettes, that is to say, talked of the books that never would 
be written. 

Lord Currie went away before the summer, and Rennell 
Rodd was left in charge of the Embassy. I got to know a 
quantity of people : Russians, Romans, Americans, Germans, 
Austrians ; and a stream of foreigners and English people 
poured through Rome. I went on taking Russian lessons 
and also lessons in modern Greek, and slowly and gradually 
I made my first discoveries in Russian literature written in 
the Russian language. I read Pushkin's prose stories aloud, 
some of his poems, and Alexis Tolstoy's poems, and some of 
Tourgenev's prose. 

One of the poems that affected me like a landmark and eye- 
opener in my literary travels was a poem called Tropar (Tro- 
parion : a dirge for the dead), by Alexis Tolstoy. I think even a 
bald prose version will give some idea of the majesty of that 
poem. 

Hymn 

" What delight is there in this life that is not mingled with 
earthly sorrow ? Whose hopes have not been in vain, and 
where among mortals is there one who is happy ? Of 
all the fruits of our labour and toil, there is nothing that 
shall last and nothing that is of any worth. Where is the 
earthly glory that shall endure and shall not pass away ? All 
things are but ashes, and a phantom, shadow and smoke. 
Everything shall vanish as the dust of a whirlwind ; and face to 
face with death, we are defenceless and unarmed ; the hand 
of the mighty is feeble, and the commands of Kings are as 
nothing. Receive, O Lord, Thy departed Servant into Thy 
happy dwelling-p]ace. 

" Death like a furious knight -at -arms encountered me, and 
like a robber he laid me low ; the grave opened, its jaws and took 
away from me all that was alive. Kinsmen and children, save 
yourselves, I call to you from the grave. Be saved, my brothers 
and my friends, so that you may not behold the flames of Hell. 
17 



258 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Life is the kingdom of vanity, and as we sniff the odour 
of death, we wither like flowers. Why do we toss about in 
vain ? Our thrones are all graves, and our palaces are but 
ruins. Receive, O Lord, Thy departed Servant into Thy happy 
dwelling-place. 

" Amidst the heap of rotting bones, who is king or servant, 
or judge or warrior ? Who is deserving of the Kingdom of God 
and who is the rejected and the evil-doer ? O brothers, where 
is the gold and the silver, where are the many hosts of servants ? 
Who is a rich man and who is a poor man ? All is ashes and 
smoke, and dust and mould, phantom and shadow and dream ; 
only with Thee in Heaven, O Lord, there is refuge and 
safety ; that which was flesh shall perish, and our pomp fall in 
corruption. Receive, O Lord, Thy departed Servant into Thy 
happy dwelling-place. 

" And Thou, who dost intercede on behalf of us all, Thou, 
the defender of the oppressed, to Thee, most Blessed One, we 
cry, on behalf of our brother who lies here. Pray to thy Divine 
Son. Pray, O most Pure among Women, for him. Grant that 
having lived out his life upon earth, he may leave his affliction 
behind him. All things are ashes, dust and smoke and shadow. 

friends, put not your faith in a phantom ! When, on some 
sudden day, the corruption of death shall breathe upon us, 
we shall perish like wheat, cut down by the sickle in the 
cornfields. Receive, Lord, Thy departed Servant into Thy 
happy dwelling-place. 

" I follow I know not what path ; half -hopeful, half -afraid, 

1 go ; my sight is dim, my heart has grown cold, my hearing is 
faint, my eyes are closed. I am lying sightless and without 
motion, I cannot hear the wailing of the brethren, and the blue 
smoke from the censer pours forth for me no fragrance ; yet 
my love shall not die; and in the name of that love, my 
brothers, I implore you, that each one of you may thus call 
upon God : Lord, on that day, when the trumpet shall sound 
the end of the world, receive Thy departed Servant, O Lord, 
into Thy happy dwelling-place." 

Looking back on that summer in Rome, I shut my eyes now, 
and I see the Campagna, with its prodigal wealth of tall grasses 
and gay wild flowers ; its little sharp asphodels with their 
faint smell of garlic; the Villa d'Este, with its overgrown 



ROME 259 

terraces, and musical waterfalls, and tangled vegetation — the 
home of an invisible slumbering Princess ; and Tivoli. 

" Tibur Argaeo positum colono 
Sit meae sedes utinam senectse 
Sit modus lasso maris et viarum 
Militiaeque." 

That was the first Ode of Horace I ever read when I was up 
to Arthur Benson, in Remove, at Eton. I remember wondering 
at the time, what sort of place Tibur was, where Horace, 
tired of journeys by land and by sea, and tired of wars and 
rumours of war, wished to build himself a final nest. 

When I saw Tivoli, with its divinely elegant waterfall, I 
understood his wish ; nor could I imagine a more enchanting 
haven, a more complete and peaceful final goal for the end of 
a pilgrimage. 

I see the lake of Nemi, where the barges of Tiberius — is it 
Tiberius ? — still rest beneath the water ; and Frascati, and the 
view from the roof of a house in the Via — which Via ? I forget, 
but it was not far from Porta Pia ; and from thence, in the red 
sunset, you saw St. Peter's ; and I see the view of the whole 
city from the Janiculum . . . more memories here, and older 
ones from Macaulay . . . and the Palatine by moonlight ; the 
moon streaming on all the thousand fragments, and the few 
large plinths of the Forum ; and Vernon Lee saying that moon- 
light on the Palatine sounded like a stage direction in a play of 
Shelley's ; and I see the marbles coloured like some pale sea- 
weed in Santa Maria in Cosmedin, and the peep at St. Peter's, 
through the keyhole of one of the College gardens, and the 
fountains in the moonlight, on the top of the hill, as you drive 
from the station, and the fountain of Trevi into which I threw 
a penny, wishing that I might come back to Rome, one day, 
but not as a diplomat ; and the Milanese shops in the Corso, and 
the vast cool spaces of St. Peter's, on a hot day, when you swung 
back the heavy curtain ; and the courtyard in Brewster's 
Palace ; and then the heat ; the great heat when the shutters 
were shut, and one stayed indoors all day ; and the arrival of an 
Indian Prince, whom we met in frock-coats, at six in the morning, 
at the railway station, and who turned out not to be a Prince 
at all, but a man of inferior caste, and who drank far too much 
whisky, and far too little soda, in the Embassy garden, and 



260 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

became painfully loud and familiar ; and at a little tea-party 
in my rooms, with Brewster and someone else ; a Roman lady, 
looking like a Renaissance picture, regal, stately, in a white 
fur and tippet ; a lady with hosts of adorers, who, when 
she saw a book on the Burmese or Buddhism, on my table, 
called The Hearts of Men, said with a smile : " That is a 
subject, I think, I know something about"; and the Roman 
•women, no less majestic, but more vociferous, in the Trastevere, 
or kneeling with the grace of sculpture before the Pieta in 
St. Peter's. 

To look back upon, it is all a wonderful dream-world of 
sunshine and flowers and beauty ; but at the time, I did not 
really like Rome. In spite of the many charming people I met 
there, in spite of the associations of the past, and the daily 
beauty of the present, I did not enjoy living at Rome as a 
diplomat. There was a good deal to do at the Embassy, and 
not a large staff, and I only once went for an expedition that 
lasted more than one day. Besides which, a diplomat at Rome 
was caught in a net of small social duties, visits, days on which 
one had to call at the Embassies, cards to be left ; one could 
not enjoy Rome freely. Besides which, I felt as if I were living 
in a cemetery, and I was oppressed by the army of ghosts in 
the air, the host of memories, so many crumbling walls and 
momentous ruins. 

At the end of July, I went to Russia, and spent three weeks 
at Sosnofka, where the whole of the Benckendorff family and 
one of their cousins were staying. I could now understand 
Russian and read it without difficulty, and could talk enough to 
get on. I had come to the definite conclusion that I did not 
care for Diplomacy as a career. I did not think then, and I 
do not think now, that it is worse than any other career. " II 
n'y a pas de sot metier," and Diplomacy, like anything else, 
is what you make it. But unless your heart is in the work, 
unless you like it for its own sake, you will never make anything 
of it, and I did not like it. I wanted literary work. 

My first step was to try and get back to England. I applied 
for a temporary exchange into the Foreign Office and got it. 
I went back to London in January 1903, and worked in the 
Foreign Office, in the Commercial Department, for the rest of 
that summer. In the autumn, I went to Russia once more, and 
spent most of my time translating a selection of Leonardo da 



ROME 261 

Vinci's Thoughts on Art and Life for the Humanists' Library, 
published by the Merrymount Press, Boston. 

I wanted to devote myself to literature ; but it was difficult 
to find an opening. I had little to show except a book of poems 
published in 1902, three articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 
an article in the Saturday Review, and one in the National 
Review. 

I approached a publisher with the proposal of translating all 
Dostoievsky's novels, or those of Gogol. But he said there would 
be no market for such books in England. Dostoievsky had 
not yet been discovered, and in one of the leading literary 
London newspapers, even as late as 1905, he was spoken of in 
a long, serious article, as being a kind of Xavier de Montepin ! 
Gogol has not yet been discovered, and only one of his books 
has been adequately translated. 

I cared for the Foreign Office even less than for Diplomacy ; 
and the only incident of interest I remember was one day when 
one of those toy snakes that you squeeze and shut up in a box, 
and which expand when released to an enormous size, and hurtle 
through the air with a scream, was circulated in the Office in a 
red box. Every department was taken in, in turn ; and when 
it reached my department, I sent it up to the typists' department, 
where it was opened by the head lady typist, a severe lady, who 
was so overcome that she at once applied for and received three 
weeks' leave, as well as a letter of abject apology from myself. 

I made up my mind to abandon Diplomacy and the Foreign 
Office as a career, to go to Russia, to study Russian thoroughly, 
and then to make the most of my knowledge later, and to use 
it as a means for doing something in literature ; but before 
doing this, I applied to be put en disponibilite for six months, 
and I went back to Russia just after Christmas in 1904. 

Count Benckendorff had been appointed Ambassador to 
London and had taken up his duties in January, 1903. All j 
through the autumn of 1903, the political situation in the Far ! 
East had given rise to anxiety. Russia and Japan seemed to 
be drifting into war. The Russian Government apparently did 
not want to go to war, but nobody in it had a definite policy ; 
and the strings were being pulled by various incompetent 
adventurers in the Far East. The Japanese took advantage 
of this and brought matters to a head. 

Before I went to Russia, I saw Lord Currie and Lady Currie 



262 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

for the last time in London. Lord Currie had given up 
Diplomacy. He did not believe there would be war, nor did 
many people at the Foreign Office, but they based their belief 
on what they thought were the wishes of the Russian Govern- 
ment. They knew nothing of the more definite intentions of 
the Japanese, nor of the irresponsible factors among the Russians 
in the Far East. 

I arrived at St. Petersburg just after Christmas. 



CHAPTER XIV 
RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA 

WHEN I arrived at St. Petersburg, the situation was 
regarded as grave, but people still did not believe 
in war. Sir Charles Scott, our Ambassador, had 
just left, or was just leaving ; and Cecil Spring Rice was in charge 
at the Embassy. The large Court functions which were held 
at the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg, just after Christmas, 
were to take place : the Court concert and the State bail. The 
concert was held, and Chaliapine sang at it, but the State ball 
was put off. And never again was a State ball given in St. 
Petersburg. I had never seen St. Petersburg before. I was 
staying in the Fontanka, at Countess Shuvaloffs house, and I 
was delighted by the crystal atmosphere, and the drives in 
open carriages ; there was a little snow on the ground, but not 
enough for sledging. 

People said there would be no war, and then we woke up one 
morning and heard the Japanese had attacked the Russian 
fleet at Port Arthur, and torpedoed the Retvizan. Constantine 
Benckendorff, Count Benckendorff's eldest son, was on board 
the Retvizan when this happened ; and I was told afterwards, 
that no orders had been given by the port authorities, that is 
to say, by Alexeieff , the Viceroy, to put out torpedo-nets, or to 
take any precautions, although the Viceroy had been warned 
that day of the probability of an attack. The morning we 
heard that war had been declared I remember seeing a cabman 
driving by himself down the quays and nodding his head and 
repeating to himself: "War! war!" (" Voina ! voina!"). 
It was like, on a smaller scale, the days of August 1914. The 
crowds in the street were enthusiastic. Officers were carried 
in triumph in the streets by the students, the same officers 
that a year later were hooted and stoned in the same streets. 
I only stayed a short time in St. Petersburg, and then I went 

to Moscow, to the house of Marie Karlovna von Kotz, a lady 

263 



264 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

who took in English pupils, mostly officers in the British Army, 
to teach them Russian. She lived in an out-of-the-way street, 
on the second story of a small house, and gave one or two lessons 
every day. She was a fine teacher, and a brilliant musician ; 
an energetic and extremely competent woman, and an example 
of the best type of the intelligentsia. 

One day, a friend of hers, a young married lady, came in and 
said she was starting for the Far East, as a hospital nurse. . She 
seemed to be full of enthusiasm. She was a young and charming 
person, bristling with energy and intelligence. The sequel of 
this story was a strange one. A year later, she reappeared at 
Marie Karlovna's house — I think she had been to the war in 
the meantime — and said : " I am now going to the Far West," 
and she went to Paris. She stayed there a short time, and then 
came back to Moscow and went to the play every night, bought 
jewels, went to hear the gipsies, and then quite suddenly shot 
herself on Tchekov's tomb. The explanation of her act being 
her disgust with public events and her wish to give her 
land to the peasants. She left her estate to them in her will. 
In the normal course of things it would go to her brother, but 
her brother was a fanatical reactionary, and she killed herself 
rather than he should have it. But, as it turned out, she had 
reckoned without Russian law, which said that the wills and 
bequests of those who committed suicide in Russia were null 
and void, and so the property went to her brother after all. 
Suicides at the tomb of Tchekov became so frequent that a 
barrier was put round it, and people were forbidden to visit it. 

There were one or more other pupils living in Marie Kar- 
lovna's house besides the English Consul, who used to board 
there. We used to have dinner at two o'clock in the afternoon, 
and a late supper, ending in tea, which used to go on till far 
into the night. It was there I made my first acquaintance 
with the peculiar comfortless comfort of Russian life among 
the intelligentsia. Nothing could seemingly and theoretically 
be more uncomfortable ; the hours irregular ; no door to any 
room ever being shut ; no fireplaces, only a stove lit once every 
twenty-four hours ; visitors drifting in, and sitting and talking 
' for hours ; but nothing in practice was more comfortable. There 
was an indescribable ease about the life, a complete absence of 
fuss, a fluid intimacy without any of the formalities, any of the 
small conventions and minute ritual that distinguish German 



RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA 265 

bourgeois life and, indeed, are a part of its charm. In Russia, 
everybody seemed to take everybody and everything for granted. 
There were no barriers, no rules, no obstacles. No explanations 
were ever thought necessary or were either ever asked for or 
given. Time, too, had no meaning. One long conversation 
succeeded another, into which different people drifted, and 
from which people departed without anyone asking why or 
whence or whither. Moscow in winter was a comfortable city. 
The snow was deep ; sometimes in the evening we would go to 
the montagnes Russes and toboggan down a steep chute, and 
more often I would go to the play. 

At that time the Art Theatre at Moscow, the Hudozhestvenii 
Teater, was at the height of its glory and of its excellence. This 
theatre had been started about four years previously by a 
companyof well-to-do amateurs under the direction of M. Stanis- 
lavsky. I believe, although I am not quite sure, they began 
by acting the Mikado for fun, continued acting for pleasure, 
and determined to spare neither trouble nor expense in making 
their performances as perfect as possible. They took a theatre, 
and gave performances almost for nothing, but the success of 
these performances was so great, the public so affluent, that 
they were obliged to take a new theatre and charge high prices. 
Gradually the Art Theatre became a public institution. In 
1904 they possessed the best all-round theatre in Russia, if not 
in Europe. 

The rise of such a theatre in Russia was not the same thing 
as that of an Art Theatre would be in London. For in Moscow 
and St. Petersburg there were large State-paid theatres where 
ancient and modern drama was performed by highly trained 
and excellent artists ; but it stood in relation to these theatres as 
the Theatre Antoine to the Comedie Francaise, the Vaudeville, 
and the Gymnase in Paris : with this difference, that the acting, 
though equally finished, was more natural, and the quality of 
the plays performed unique on the European stage. The Art 
Theatre made the reputation of Tchekov as a dramatist. His 
first serious play, Ivanov, was performed at one of the minor 
theatres at Moscow, and we can read in his letters what he 
thought of that performance. Another of his important plays, 
the Seagull (Chaika), was performed at one of the big State-paid 
theatres at St. Petersburg, and well performed, but on con- 
ventional lines. It is not surprising the play failed. When 



266 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

this same play was performed by the Art Theatre at Moscow, 
it was triumphantly and instantly successful. The reason is 
that Tchekov's plays demand a peculiar treatment on the stage 
to make their subtle points tell, and cross the footlights. In 
them the clash of events is subservient to the human figure ; 
and the human figure itself to the atmosphere in which it is 
plunged. Later, I saw the Seagull played at a State theatre at 
St. Petersburg, long after Tchekov's reputation was firmly estab- 
lished. It was well played, but the effect of the play was ruined, 
or rather non-existent. In London, I saw the Cherry Orchard 
and another play of his done, where the company had not even 
realised the meaning of the action, besides being costumed in 
the most grotesquely impossible clothes, as grotesque and im- 
possible as it would be to put on the English stage a member 
of Parliament returning from the House of Commons in a kilt, 
or dressed as a harlequin. One of the most dramatic situations 
in one of these plays had simply escaped the notice of the pro- 
ducer, and was allowed not only to fall flat, but was not rendered 
at all. It was this : a man, who has been wounded in the head 
and has a bandage, has a quarrel with his mother, and in a 
passion of rage, he tears his bandage from his head, with the 
object of reopening his wound, and killing himself. The company 
had, I suppose, read the stage direction, which says : " Man 
removes bandage," and the words of the scene were spoken 
without any emotion or emphasis, and at one moment, the man 
quietly removed his bandage, and dropped it on the floor, as 
though it were in the way, or as if he were throwing down a 
cigarette which he has done with. 

In Moscow, in the Art Theatre, every effect was made to 
tell, and the acting was so natural that on one occasion I 
remember a man in the stage-box joining in the conversation 
and contradicting one of the actors. Although the ensemble 
of the troupe was superlative, they had no actor or actress of 
outstanding genius, no Duse, no Sarah Bernhardt, no Irving, 
no Chaliapine ; on the other hand, there was not one small part 
which was not more than adequately played. 

In 1904, they had just produced the Cherry Orchard by 
Tchekov, and soon afterwards, Tchekov died. That winter, I 
saw the Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vania, Shakespeare's Julius 
Ccesar, and Hauptmann's Lonely Lives. 

The end of Uncle Vania was unforgettable. The subject 



RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA 267 

and action of that play can be summed up in a few words. The 
play is called Scenes from Country Life. A professor, not unlike 
Casaubon, in Middlemarch, marries a young and beautiful wife. 
His estate is managed by his first wife's brother, Uncle Vania, 
assisted by his niece, a good girl ill-favoured in looks. Astroff, 
a doctor, is called in to minister to the professor. Uncle Vania 
is in love with the professor's wife. His niece, Sonia, is in love 
with Astroff. The professor's wife, a non-moral, well-meaning 
Circe, is interested, but not more than interested, in the doctor, 
and flirts with him enough to prevent his marrying the girl. 
The nerves of these various characters, under the stress of the 
situation, are worked up to such a pitch, that Uncle Vania actually 
tries to kill the professor, and shoots at him twice, but misses 
him. Then the professor and his wife go away ; the doctor 
goes back to his practice, and Uncle Vania and his niece are 
left behind to resume the tenor of their way. You see the 
good-byes : a half-passionate, half-cynical good-bye, between 
the professor's wife and the doctor — the professor says good-bye 
to Uncle Vania, and to Uncle Vania 's old mother. You hear 
the bells of the horses outside, in the autumn evening. One 
after another, Uncle Vania's mother, his niece, and the old 
servant of the house come in and say : " They have gone ! " 

When I first saw the play, this is what I wrote about it, and 
I have nothing to add, nor could I put it differently : 

" Described, this appears insignificant ; seen, acted as it 
is with incomparable naturalness, it is indescribably effective. 
In this scene a particular mood, which we have all felt, is cap- 
tured and rendered ; a certain chord is struck which exists in 
all of us ; that kind of ' toothache at heart ' which we feel 
when a sudden parting takes place and we are left behind. 
The parting need not necessarily be a sad one. But the tenor 
of our life is interrupted. As a rule the leaves of life are turned 
over so quickly and noiselessly by Time that we are not aware 
of the process. In the case of a sudden parting we hear the 
leaf of life turn over and fall back into the great blurred book 
of the past — read, finished, and irrevocable. It is this hearing 
of the turning leaf which Tchekov has rendered merely by three 
people coming into a room one after another and saying : 
' They've gone ! ' 

" The intonation with which the old servant said : ' They've 
gone ' — an intonation of peculiar cheerfulness with which 
servants love to underline what is melancholy — was marvellous. 
The lamp is brought in. Lastly the doctor goes. The old 



268 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

mother reads a magazine by the lamplight ; the clatter of the 
horses' hoofs and the jingling of bells are heard dying away in 
the distance ; and Uncle Vania and his niece set to work at 
their accounts . . . you hear the abacus — always used in 
Russian banks — making a clicking noise . . . and the infinite 
monotony of their life begins once more." 

The first performances of the Cherry Orchard were equally 
impressive. I saw it acted many times later, but nothing 
touched the perfection of its original cast. The Cherry Orchard 
is the most symbolic play ever written. It summed up the 
I whole of pre-revolutionary Russia. The charming, feckless 
| class of landowners ; the pushing, common, self-made man, 
who with his millions buys the estate with the cherry orchard 
that the owners have at last to sell, because they cannot con- 
sent to let it to cut their losses ; the careless student ; the 
grotesque governess ; all of them dancing on the top of a volcano 
which is heaving and already rumbling with the faint noise of 
the coming convulsion. The Russo-Japanese War and its 
consequences were the beginning of these convulsions ; and, as 
Count Benckendorff prophesied to me in 1903, as soon as war 
came to Russia, there was a revolution." 

Pierre Benckendorff, Count Benckendorff's second son, who 
was an officer in the Gardes-a-cheval, started for Manchuria 
soon after the war began. He exchanged into a Cossack regi- 
ment for the purpose, as the Guards did not go to the front. 
He looked so radiantly young and adventurous, when he started, 
that we were all of us afraid he would never come back. He 
passed through Moscow on his way to the front, and I spent 
the day with him. He asked me why I did not try to go to the 
war as a newspaper correspondent, as I could speak Russian, 
and his father would be able to give me letters of recommenda- 
tion to the military authorities. His words sank deep, and I 
determined to try and do this. I at once wrote to his father. 

Count Benckendorff thought the idea was an excellent one ; 
and just before Easter I went to London to try and get a news- 
paper to send me out. I went to the Morning Post, where I 
knew Oliver Borthwick, the son of the proprietor, Lord Glenesk. 
At first the matter seemed to be fraught with every kind of 
difficulty, but in the end things were arranged, and towards the 
end of April I started for St. Petersburg, on my way to Man- 
churia, laden with a saddle, a bridle, a camp bed, and innumer- 



RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA 269 

able cooking utensils. I knew nothing about journalism, and 
still less about war, and I felt exactly as if I were going back to 
a private school again. 

I stopped two nights in St. Petersburg, and engaged a 
Russian servant. He was a gigantic creature, who had served 
in a cavalry regiment of the Guards. At Moscow, I met Brooke, 
who was going out as correspondent for Reuter,, and we settled 
to travel together. 

The journey was not uneventful. As far as Irkutsk, we 
travelled in the ordinary express train, which had comfortable 
first- and second-class carriages, a dining-room, a pianoforte, 
a bathroom, and a small bookcase full of Russian books. The 
journey from Moscow to Irkutsk lasted nine nights and eight 
days. Guy Brooke and I shared a first-class compartment. I 
made friends with the official who looked after the train, and 
gave him my pocket-knife ; and he undertook to post a letter for 
me when he got back to Moscow. He kept his promise, and my 
first dispatch to the Morning Post, the first dispatch from our 
batch of correspondents, got through without being censored. 
There was not much war news in it. In fact, it contained a 
long and detailed account of a performance of Tchekov's Uncle 
Vania at the Art Theatre at Moscow. 

On board the train, there was a French correspondent, 
M. Georges La Salle, and a Danish Naval Attache, and another 
English correspondent, Hamilton ; several Russian officers, 
and a Russian man of business, who lived at Vladivostok. 
This man gave us a good deal of trouble ; he thought we were 
English spies, and told us we would never be allowed to reach 
our destination. He did his best to prevent our doing so. He 
told the officers we were spies, and their manner, which at first 
had been friendly, underwent a change, and became at first 
suspicious, and finally openly hostile. The passenger trains 
ran from Irkutsk to Baikal Station, and it was at Baikal that 
the real interest of the journey began. Lake Baikal was frozen, 
and was crossed daily by two large ice-breakers, which ploughed 
through three feet of half -melted ice. The passage lasted four 
hours. The spectacle when we started was marvellous. It 
had been a glorious day. The sun in the pure frozen sky was 
like a fiery, red, Arctic ball. Before us stretched an immense 
sheet of ice, powdered with snow and spotless, except for a long 
brown track which had been made by the sledges. On the 



270 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

far-off horizon a low range of mountains disappeared in a veil of 
snow made by the low-hanging clouds. The mountains were 
intensely blue ; they glinted like gems in the cold air, and we 
seemed to be making for some mysterious island, some miraculous 
reef of sapphires. Towards the west there was another and 
more distant range, where the intense deep blue faded into a 
delicate and transparent sea-green — the colour of the seas 
round the Greek Islands — and these hills were like a phantom 
continuation of the larger range, as unearthly and filmy as a 
mirage. 

As we moved, the steamer ploughed the ice into flakes, 
which leapt and were scattered into fantastic, spiral shapes, and 
flowers of ice and snow. As the sun sank lower, the strange- 
ness and the beauty increased. A pink halo crept over the 
sky round the sun, which became more fiery and metallic. Some 
lines from Coleridge's " Ancient Mariner " came into my head 
which exactly fitted the scene : 

" And now there came both mist and snow 
And it grew wondrous cold : 
And ice, mast-high, came floating by 
As green as emerald." 

As the sun set the whole sky became pink, and the distant 
mountains were like ghostly caverns of ice. 

We arrived at eight. It was dark, and the other ice-breaker 
was starting on its return journey to the sound of military 
music. 

About eleven o'clock we resumed our journey. The train 
was so full that it was impossible not only to get a seat in the 
first- or second-class, but at first it seemed doubtful whether we 
should obtain a place of any kind in the train. I jumped into 
a third-class carriage, which was at once invaded by a crowd of 
muzhik women and children. An official screamed ineffectually 
that the carriage was reserved for the military; upon which 
an angry muzhik, waving a huge loaf of bread (like an enormous 
truncheon), cried out, pointing to the seething, heterogeneous 
crowd : " Are we not military also — one and all of us 
reservists ? " And they refused to move. 

The confusion was incredible, and one man, by the vehement 
way in which he flung himself and his property on his wooden 
seat, broke it, and fell with a crash to the ground. The third- 



RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA 271 

class carriages were formed in this way : the carriage was not 
divided into separate compartments, but was like a corridor 
carriage, with no partition and no doors between the carriage 
proper and the corridor. It was divided into three sections, 
each section consisting of six plank beds, three on each side 
of the window, and one placed above the other, forming three 
stories. There was besides this one tier of seats against and 
over the windows in the passage at right -angles to the regular 
seats. The occupant of each place had a right to the whole 
length of the seat, so that he could lie down at full length. I 
gave up my seat in the first carriage, as I had lost sight of my 
luggage and my servant, and I went in search of the guard. 
The guard found places for Brooke and myself in a carriage 
occupied mostly by soldiers. He told them to make room for 
us. It seemed difficult, but it was done. I was encamped on 
a plank at the top of the corridor part of the carriage. I re- 
member being awakened the next morning by a scuffle. A 
party of Chinese coolies had invaded the train. They were 
drunk and they slobbered. The soldiers shouted : " Get out, 
Chinese." They were bundled backwards and forwards, and 
rolled on to the platform outside the train, where they were 
allowed to settle. It was now, in this railway carriage, that I 
for the first time came into intimate contact with the Russian 
people, for in a third-class railway carriage the artificial barriers 
of life are broken down, and everyone treats everyone else 
as an equal. I was immensely interested. The soldiers began 
to get up. One of them, dressed in a scarlet shirt, stood against 
the window and said his prayers to the rising sun, crossing 
himself many times. A little later a stowaway arrived ; he 
had no ticket, and the under-guard advised him to get under the 
seat during the visit of the ticket collector. This he did, and 
he stayed there until the visit of the ticket collector was over, 
and whenever a new visit was threatened, he hid again. 

After the first day, I was offered a seat on the ground floor 
in the central division of the carriage, because I had a bad 
foot, and the fact was noticed. My immediate neighbours 
were Little Russians. They asked many questions : whether the 
English were orthodox ; the price of food and live stock ; the 
rate of wages in England ; and they discussed foreign countries 
and foreign languages in general. One of them said French 
was the most difficult language, and Russian the easiest. The 



272 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

French were a clever people. " As clever as you ? " I asked. 
" No," they answered ; " but when we say clever we mean nice." 

I gradually made the acquaintance of all the occupants of 
the compartment. They divided the day into what they called 
" occupation " and " relaxation." Occupation meant doing 
something definite like reading or making a musical instru- 
ment — one man was making a violin- — relaxation meant playing 
cards, doing card tricks, telling stories, or singing songs. In the 
evening a bearded soldier, a native of Tomsk, asked me to 
write down my name on a piece of paper, as he wished to mention 
in a letter home that he had seen an Englishman. He had 
never seen one before, but sailors had told him that English- 
men were easy to get on with, and clean — much cleaner than 
Russians. He told me his story, which was an extremely 
melancholy one. He had fallen asleep on sentry-go and had 
served a term of imprisonment, and had been deprived of civil 
rights. For the first time I came across the aching sadness one 
sometimes met with among Russians, an unutterable despair, 
a desperate, mute anguish. The conversation ended with an 
exchange of stories among the soldiers. One of them told me a 
story about a priest. He wondered whether I knew what a 
priest meant, and to make it plain he said : " A priest, you 
know, is a man who always lies." 

I asked the bearded man if he knew any stories. He at 
once sat down and began a fairy-tale called The Merchant's Son. 
It took an hour and a half in the telling. Very often the men 
who in Russia told such stories could neither read nor write, 
but this man could read, though he had never read the story 
he told me in a book. It had been handed down to him by his 
parents, and to them by his grandparents, and so on, word for 
word, with no changes. This is probably how the Iliad was 
handed down to one generation after another. Later on I was 
told stories like this one, by men who could neither read nor 
write. The story was full of dialogue and reiteration, and 
every character in it had its own epithet which recurred through- 
out the story, every time the character was mentioned, just as 
in Homer. When he had finished his story, he began another 
called Ivan the Little Fool. It began in this kind of way : 
" Once upon a time in a certain country, in a certain kingdom, 
there lived a King and a Queen, who had three sons, all braver 
and brighter than pen can write or story can tell, and the 



RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA 273 

third was called Ivan the Fool. The King spoke to them thus : 
' Take each of you an arrow, pull your bow-string taut, and shoot 
in different directions, and where the arrow falls there shall you 
find a wife.' The eldest brother shot an arrow, and it fell on 
a palace just opposite the King's daughters' quarters ; and the 
second son shot an arrow, and it fell opposite the red gate of the 
house where lived the lovely merchant's daughter ; and the third 
brother shot an arrow, and it fell in a muddy swamp and a frog 
caught it. And Ivan said : 'How can I marry a frog ? ' She 
is too small for me.' And the King said to him : 'Take her.' " 
And then the story went on for a long time, and in it Ivan the 
Fool was, of course, far more successful than his two elder 
brothers. Another soldier told me a version of the story of 
King John and the Abbot of Canterbury. 

The ballad says that King John asked the Abbot three 
questions. The first one was how much he was worth ; the 
second one how soon he could ride round the world ; and the 
third question the Abbot had to answer was, what the King was 
thinking of. And the Abbot answered the third question by 
saying : " You think I'm the Abbot of Canterbury, but I am 
really only his shepherd in disguise." The soldier told it in 
exactly the same way, except that the Abbot became a 
Patriarch, and King John the Tsar of Moscow, and the shepherd 
a miller. And when he had finished, he said : " The miller lives 
at Moscow and I have seen him." 

The soldiers spoke little of the war. One of them said 
the Japanese were a savage race, upon which the sailor who had 
been to Nagasaki, cut him short by saying : " They are a 
charming, clean people, much more cultivated than you or I." 
One of the soldiers said it would have been a more sensible 
arrangement if the dispute had been settled by a single combat 
between Marquis Ito and Count Lamsdorff. 

The night before we arrived at Manchuria station the 
passengers sang songs. Four singers sang some magnificent 
folk-songs, and among others the song of the Siberian exiles : 
" Glorious Sea of Holy Baikal," one singing the melody and 
the others joining in by repeating or imitating it. But the song 
which was the most popular was a ballad sung by a sailor, 
who was taking part in the concert. He had composed it 
himself. It was quite modern in tune and intensely senti- 
mental. It was about a fallen maiden, who had left the palaces 
18 



274 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

of the rich and died in hospital. It was exactly like the kind 
of song I heard bluejackets sing on board an English man-of- 
war years later. At Manchuria station we had a lot of bother 
owing to the commercial gentleman, and I annoyed him greatly 
by talking in front of him to a Greek merchant, who was at the 
buffet, in Greek — a language with which he was imperfectly 
acquainted. The commercial gentleman tried to prevent us 
going farther, but he did not succeed, as our papers were in 
perfect order. But he succeeded in having us put under arrest, 
and two Cossacks were told to keep watch over us during the 
remainder of the journey. In the meantime the officers had 
telegraphed for information about us to Kharbin, and the next 
morning they received a satisfactory answer, and their whole 
demeanour changed. From Manchuria station to Kharbin the 
journey lasted three days and two nights, and we arrived at 
Kharbin after a journey of seventeen days from St. Petersburg. 

I have forgotten the latter part of that journey, but I re- 
corded at the time that a crowd of Chinese officers boarded the 
train at one station and filled up the spare seats, especially 
top seats, whence they spat without ceasing on the occupants 
of the lower seats, much to the annoyance of a French lady, 
who said : " Les Chinois sont impossibles." 

Kharbin was a large, straggling place, part of which con- 
sisted of a Chinese quarter, an " Old " Russian quarter which 
was like a slice of a small Russian provincial town, and a modern 
quarter : Government Offices, an hotel, restaurants, a church, 
and the Russo-Chinese bank. 

The sight of Kharbin when I arrived — the mud, the absence 
of vehicles, the squalor, the railway station, a huge art nouveau 
edifice, the long vistas of muddy roads or swampy trails, the 
absence of any traces of civilisation, and then the hotel, which 
was dearer than any hotel I have ever stayed at before or 
since, with its damp, dirty room and suspicious bedstead, and 
its convict squinting waiters still redolent of jail life, and its 
millions of flies — filled me with despair. At the beginning of 
the war Kharbin was the centre of everything that was undesir- 
able in the Russian army and in the civilian populations of the 
whole world. Later on, Kuropatkin forbade officers to go there 
except under special circumstances. When we arrived, there 
were a certain number of officers on their way to the front, 
and of officers who had escaped from the front for a few days 5 



RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA 275 

leave. The restaurants were full of noisy, shouting crowds, 
and nondescript ladies in cheap finery, about which everything 
was doubtful except their profession. 

There were a number of Greek traders in the town ; and 
wherever there is a war, in whatever part of the world, Greek 
traders seem to rise from the ground as if by magic, with 
sponges and other necessaries, for sale. At Harbin, there 
was also a local population of engineers and soldiers, who had 
jobs there, but these I only got to know a year later. I made 
the acquaintance of Colonel Potapoff at Kharbin. He was one 
of the press censors who had to look after the correspondents. 
He had been to South Africa. We became friends with him at 
once, and I saw him frequently during the next ten years. 

I only stayed a week at Kharbin. I travelled to Mukden 
in great luxury in a first-class carriage reserved by General 
Kholodovsky. The General entertained me like a prince. He 
was extremely cultivated, courteous, and well read ; a collector 
of china ; an admirer of Tolstoy ; a big game shooter. I stayed 
in his carriage a week after we had arrived at Mukden. 

At Mukden we were plunged in China proper. It was as 
Chinese, so I was told, as Pekin — even more Chinese. The town 
was a long way from the station, and one drove to it in a rick- 
shaw pulled along by a Chinese coolie. The drive took nearly 
an hour. But I made this interesting discovery, that if everyone 
goes by rickshaw it is just the same as if everyone travels by 
motor-car. You are not conscious of life being slower. The 
day after I arrived, I called at a house where some of the other 
war correspondents were living. There was Charles Hands of 
the Daily Mail, and there I made the acquaintance of M. de 
Jessen, a Danish correspondent. At the station I had already 
been met and welcomed by Whigham, who was also correspond- 
ent for the Morning Post. He had rooms in Mukden, and he 
asked me to come and share them. I did so. I moved into the 
town, and arrived at the Der- Lung-Den (the Inn of the Dragon), 
a large courtyard surrounded by a series of rooms that had no 
second story. I was shown one of these rooms and was told 
it could be mine. It seemed suitable, but it had no floor 
but earth, and no paper on the walls ; in fact, it was not more 
like a room than the stall of a stable. But the Chinese hotel- 
keeper said that would be all right. An architect, a builder, 
and an upholsterer were sent for, and that very day the stall 



276 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

was converted into a comfortable and elegant bedroom, with a 
floor carpeted with matting and an elegant wall-paper, and was 
ready for use. Apparently the Chinese did not make a room 
inhabitable in an hotel until they knew someone was going to 
inhabit it . The next thing was to get a servant . I had brought 
a servant from Russia, but he had complained of the hard work. 
In fact, he had said he was not used to work at all. As he had 
been a trooper in a cavalry regiment this seemed a little strange, 
but he explained that the work had always been done for him. 
He was not one of the World's Workers. He showed signs of 
grumbling, but Colonel Potapoff made short work of his griev- 
ance and packed him off home by the next train. I engaged a 
Chinese servant, called Afoo, who came from southern China. 

The next thing was to buy a pony and engage a groom, a 
Mafoo. When it became known I wanted a pony, the whole 
yard seemed to swarm with ponies. I bought one with the 
assistance of the hotel-keeper. It seemed to be a fairly amen- 
able animal, but the Mafoo, whom I engaged afterwards, at once 
pointed out to me that it was almost blind in one eye. I soon 
made the acquaintance of all the other correspondents : Ludovic 
Naudeau, who was writing for the Journal ; Recouly, who was 
writing for the Temps ; Archibald, who was photographing for 
I don't know how many American newspapers ; Millard, who 
wrote for the New York World ; Simpson, who was the Daily 
Telegraph correspondent ; Colonel Gaedke, the representative 
of the Berliner Tageblatt, and Premier Lieutenant von Schwartz, 
who wrote for the Lokal Anzeiger. 

M. de Jessen has written a chapter of sketches on all these 
characters, and the life we lived at Mukden, in a book called 
Men I Have Met, published in Copenhagen in 1909. The best 
writer of all these was probably Ludovic Naudeau. Charles 
Hands could have rivalled him, but he wisely never, or hardly 
ever, put pen to paper. 

Colonel Gaedke stood aloof in his military technical know- 
ledge. He was stiff in opinions, and, as it happened, always in 
the wrong. He was one of those people who are wrong from 
the right reasons. He saw at once that people talked nonsense 
about the Russian Army, and this led him rashly to prophesy 
they would win the war. He was indignant with the strategy 
of the higher command. He used to arrive in a great state of 
excitement and say : " Kuropatkin has again made a mistake." 



RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA 277 

And on one occasion he told me that if the Russian Generals 
went on waging war in such a fashion, he would go home, he 
simply could not look on at so many glaring errors in tactics 
and strategy. 

Of the correspondents the most extraordinary character was 
Archibald. He wore about four rows of medals on his tunic. In 
fact, he went to war to collect medals, and he had been with the 
Boers and with the English during the South African War. He 
was the despair of the press censors. He wanted to go home 
after he had been at Mukden a certain time and had taken a 
number of photographs ; but he wanted to go home via Japan 
and not across the Trans-Siberian railway. This correspondents 
had promised not to do, but Archibald had determined to do it. 
He took one of the press censors with him to Pekin, and arranged 
for his party to be kidnapped and subsequently rescued. When 
he came back, he used the adventure as a lever, and obtained 
the permission he wished. His imagination was unlimited, and 
his power of statement unrivalled. When he came back from 
Pekin he said he had interviewed the Emperor of China and the 
Empress, and he had been made a Mandarin of the highest 
class. During the European War, I believe he got into trouble 
by bringing Austrian papers into England. 

M. de Jessen was the most amiable of Danes, a shrewd 
observer and a vivid writer. But the most interesting of all 
the correspondents I knew was a Russian I met later, called 
Nicholas Popoff, who was destined to be one of the pioneers of 
flying in Russia, and one of the first pilots to accomplish daring 
feats in the air. Alas ! he paid for his temerity with a bad 
crash, which disabled him for life. 

We led a restless but amusing life. Everyone wanted to 
go to the front, and nobody was allowed to go. 

Mukden would have been an ideal spot to spend the summer 
in, if there had been no war going on. The climate was warm ; 
the air fresh ; the place full of colour, variety, and interest. 
Mukden is a large, square town surrounded by a huge, thick, 
dilapidated, and mouldering wall, on the top of which you can 
go for a long walk. Inside the wall, the closely packed one- 
storied houses are intersected by two or three main streets and 
innumerable small alleys . The shops in the main streets are gay 
and splendid with sign-boards : huge blue-and-red boots covered 
with gold stars hang in front of the bootmakers ; golden and 



278 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

many coloured shields and banners hang in front of other shops ; 
gongs clang outside the theatres to attract the passers-by ; 
every now and then a Mandarin rides by, gorgeous in navy 
blue and canary-coloured satin, on a white fast-trotting 
pony, and behind him, at a respectful distance, his servant 
follows him on a less elegant piece of horse-flesh ; or large 
carts lumber along with prehistoric wheels, and with the 
curtains of their closed hoods drawn, probably conveying 
some Chinese ladies. Add to all this, sunshine and the smell 
of life and brilliant colour. There is nothing modern in the 
town. It is the same as it was a thousand years ago, and at 
Mukden you could live the same life as a contemporary of Julius 
Caesar lived. One of the most curious features of Mukden is 
the palace. It is deserted, but it still contains a collection of 
priceless art treasures, jewels, china, embroidery, : and illuminated 
MSS. These treasures are locked up in mouldering cupboards. 
Its courtyards are carpeted with luxuriant grass, its fantastic 
dilapidated wooden walls are carven, painted, and twisted into 
strange shapes such as you see on an Oriental vase. The planks 
are rotten, the walls eaten with rain and damp, and one thanks 
Heaven that it is so, and that nothing has been restored. 

In Mukden no house had more than one story, and the 
houses of the well-to-do were divided into quadrangles like 
an Oxford College. Life at Mukden, without the complicated 
machinery of European modern life, without any of the appli- 
ances that are devised for comfort and which so often are engines 
of unrest, had all the comforts one could wish. There were no 
bathrooms ; on the other hand, if you wanted a hot bath, a 
Chinaman would bring you an enormous tub, long and broad 
enough to lie down in, and nil it with boiling water from kettles. 
There was no question of the bath being tepid because some- 
thing had gone wrong with the pipes or the tap. 

Mukden reminded me of a Chinese fairy-tale by Hans Ander- 
sen. The buildings, the shops, the temples, the itinerant 
pedlars, the sounding gongs, the grotesque signs seemed to 
belong to the realm of childish trolldom or to some great panto- 
mime. It was in the place of Mukden, one felt, that the 
Emperor of China, whom Andersen tells of, sat and sighed for 
the song of the nightingale, when his artificial metallic singing 
bird suddenly snapped and ceased to sing. Still more enchanting 
in the same way were the tombs of Pai-Ling and Fu-Ling. 



RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA 279 

Here the delicate and gorgeous-coloured buildings, red as 
lacquer and curious in design, which protect the remains of the 
Manchurian dynasty, are approached by wild wood-ways, paths 
of soft grass, and alleys of aromatic and slumber-scented trees. 

The high, quaint towers and ramparts which surround the 
tombs are half dilapidated, the colours are faded, the staircases 
rotten and overgrown with moss and grass, and no profane hand 
is allowed to restore or repair them. 

While I was at Mukden I had an interview with the Chinese 
Viceroy, and one day I was invited to luncheon at the Chinese 
Foreign Office. The meal was semi-European. It began with tea. 
Large uncut green tea leaves floated in delicate cups ; and over 
the cup and in it a second cup put upside down made a cover. 
There followed about seventeen courses of meat entrees, deli- 
cately cooked. I thought I would give one of the courses a miss, 
and refused a dish. The meal immediately ceased. The plan 
was evidently to go on feeding your guests till they had had 
enough, and then to stop. On the following day, the Mandarins, 
who had been present, left large red slips of paper, covered 
with elegant characters, on us ; these were visiting-cards to 
say they would call the same afternoon, and in the afternoon 
they paid us a visit in person. 

Here at Mukden we lived, and here we fretted, and I fretted 
more than anyone, as I was so inexperienced in journalism that 
I thought it was impossible to write to the newspaper unless 
something startling happened. Now I know better. Had I 
had more experience then, I should have known that Mukden 
was a mine of copy. One night we gave a dinner-party at the 
Der-Lung-Den and invited all the correspondents and the 
Press censors as well. We edited a newspaper for the occasion, 
of which one copy was written out by hand. 

The Mukden Nichevo published articles in French and in 
English ; notes, poems, a short story, and had an illustrated 
cover. 

Afoo and his fellow-servitors were in their glory when there 
was a dinner-party. Their organisation was as sure as their 
service was swift and dexterous. They were quite imperturb- 
able, and if one suddenly said a few moments before dinner : 
" There will be four extra to dinner to-night," they would calmly 
say: "Can do." Directly he came into my service Afoo asked 
for a rise of wages. He thought soldiers and fighting in general, 



280 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

and especially war, vulgar. Once I told him he was stupid. 
" Of course," he said, " I am stupid. If I were not stupid I 
should not be your servant, but a Mandarin." 

From Mukden we went to Liaoyang, where we arrived on 
the 22nd of June. Liaoyang was a smaller town than Mukden, 
and even dirtier and more picturesque. I lived at the Hotel 
International, which was kept by a Greek. It was a Chinese 
house converted into an hotel, and had about twenty rooms, 
as small as boxes, each containing a stool, a small basin, and 
the semblance of a bedstead. The building was incredibly 
dirty and squalid ; the rooms opened on to a filthy yard ; 
there was a noisy and dirty buffet, where one had food if one 
waited for hours ; and also a hall open to the sky, which was 
covered by an awning of matting during the hotter hours of 
the day. The railway station was the general rendezvous 
and the centre of Liaoyang life. There, too, was a buffet 
and its ceiling was black with flies, so black that you could not 
see a single white spot in it. I fell ill at this hotel and had a 
bad attack of dysentery. I spent the first day and night of my 
illness at the hotel, in the fly-haunted squalor of the Hotel Inter- 
national, in a high, delirious fever. My Chinese servant dis- 
appeared for two days, as there was a feast going on, and when 
he returned I dismissed him. But I was rescued by Dr. West- 
water, who had lived at Liaoyang for years, and had a clean, 
comfortable house with a beautiful garden. In those clean 
surroundings and comforts I soon recovered, and in July, 
Brooke and myself, with two Montenegrin servants, left for 
Tashichiao. We had been attached to a cavalry brigade of 
the First Siberian Army Corps, which was commanded by 
General Samsonoff. We went by train to Tashichiao, with the 
two Montenegrins, two mules, and five ponies, which it took 
twelve hours to entrain. The night I arrived at Tashichiao I 
met Count Bobrinsky, a St. Petersburg friend, and he took me 
into General Kuropatkin's train and gave me tea in his mess, 
and while I was there General Kuropatkin came in himself and 
drank tea. Brooke and I spent the night in the presbytery of 
the Catholic church in the village. 

I rode to a village a few miles south-west of Tashichiao, and 
there I found the headquarters of the Brigade established in 
the kitchen garden of a Chinese house. This was the beginning 
of a new life in a new world. 



RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA 281 

That year in Manchuria the rainy season, instead of coming 
at its proper times and lasting as long as it should have lasted, 
came in sections and by fits and starts. So the country was 
either a baked desert or a sea of mud. Looking back on that 
time now, I see, on the horizon, a range of soft blue mountains. 
In the foreground, there is a Chinese village built of mud and 
fenced with mud, and baked by the sun, yellow and hard. 
There is, perhaps, a little stream with stepping-stones in it ; 
a delicate temple, one-storied and painted red like lacquer, 
on the water bank, and round it, as far as eye can see, fields of 
giant millet. The women, dressed in dark blue, the blue of 
blue china, stand at the doorsteps, smoking their long-stemmed 
pipes, and there is a crowd of brown, fat, naked children with 
budding pig-tails. 

Then I see the battlefield of Tashichiao : a low range of soft 
blue hills in the distance ; to the west a large expanse of the most 
brilliant vivid green, from which the cone of an isolated kopje 
arose ; to the east some dark green hills, with patches of sand, 
and at their base a stretch of emerald-green giant millet ; in 
the middle of the plain a hot, sandy road ; blazing heat and a 
cloudless sky, and Japanese shells bursting in puffs of brown 
and grey, as if someone was blowing rings of tobacco smoke 
across the mountains. This battle was a long artillery duel, 
which went on from early morning until nine in the evening. 
Colonel Gaedke, who was looking on, said the Russians were 
shooting well. I wondered how he could tell. 

In the evening, after that day's battle, I rode back to 
Tashichiao to the presbytery of the Catholic church, where 
the French correspondents had been living. 

It was nine o'clock in the evening when I got home. Two 
Chinamen had just arrived to rebuild the church. They had 
pulled down the altar, and at the top of the ladder were working 
quietly at a new frieze. My two Montenegrin servants were 
quarrelling fiercely in the yard and throwing brushes and 
pans at each other. My Chinese boy had prepared a hot bath 
in the middle of the yard. A Russian gunner, grimy with dirt 
and sweat, and worn out with fighting, staggered into the yard 
and said a prayer, when he noticed the building was a church. 
The day after this, the first of many long retreats began, ending 
at Haichen station, where the buffet was full of people and 
where I managed to do a difficult thing — difficult in Manchuria, 



282 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

that is to say, where the trains waited sometimes eighteen 
hours at a station — to miss the train, and I slept on the platform. 

After that, I remember a train journey to Liaoyang, and a 
soldier crying in the train because another soldier, after using 
strings of blood-curdling language and startling obscenities, 
which did not produce any effect, as they were like worn-out 
counters, called him a sheep ; and another soldier dropping his 
rifle from the train, and jumping from the train to pick it up. 

Then, at the end of July, a ride back to Haichen, a distance 
of thirty miles, carried out in two stages, and a night spent on 
the grass at a railway siding where soldiers who guarded the 
line lived. The soldiers entertained me and gave me soup and 
bread, and tea, some cucumber, and some sugar. I thought of 
Byron's example of something solemn : 

" An Arab with a stranger for a guest." 

My host had lived in this isolated land-lighthouse for four and 
a half years. He and the other soldiers talked of places, and 
one of them said the Red Sea lay between Japan and China, near 
Colombo. Another said that the English had taken Thibet. 
They made me a bed with some hay and a blanket, and I slept 
in the field. Then came a start at dawn and a ride to Haichen, 
where there was bustle and confusion, and a battle expected ; 
and there, for the first time, I saw the ghastly sight of maimed 
soldiers being carried in with their fresh bandages, their recent 
wounds, their waxen faces, and their vague, wondering eyes. 
After that, a night in the village disturbed by a panic, and 
shouts that the Japanese were upon us, followed by the dis- 
covery that it was a false alarm, and the further discovery that 
the expected battle would not happen. We rode back to 
Liaoyang, after which I was laid up with sunstroke and again 
cured by Dr. Westwater. 

At the end of the first week of August, I started once more 
to find the Cavalry Brigade to which I had been attached. 
This time I took with me Dimitri, a dark-eyed Caucasian with a 
black beard and a nose like a beak, dressed in a long brown 
skirt with silver trimmings, and armed with a scimitar and 
several revolvers. Dimitri had lived in the saddle all his life, 
and when I complained of my pony stumbling, he said : "It's 
not the pony; the truth is, little father, that just a little you 
don't know how to ride." 



RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA 283 

I found the Brigade. It was commanded by a new General, 
called Sichkhov. He was sitting in the small and dirty room of 
a Chinese cottage ; a telegraph was ticking in the room next 
door, and everywhere flies were buzzing. " Have you brought 
us any food ? " said the General. " We have nothing here, no 
bread, no sugar." 

The General and the staff lived in the cottage in which 
there were two rooms. The rest of us lived in a garden. At 
the bottom of the garden there was a piece of trellis-work, over 
which a pumpkin twined and climbed. Under it was my valise. 
This was my bedroom. This was in the village of Davantientung. 
I stayed there six days. We used to get up very early at four 
or five. I would say " Good morning " to the doctor. He 
would draw back his hand and say : "I beg your pardon, I 
have not washed." The ceremony of washing was performed 
like this : you took off your shirt, and a Cossack poured water 
from a pewter cup over your head and your hands, and you 
could use as much soap as you pleased. At noon we had our 
midday meal, then we drank tea and slept ; later we went for 
a walk, perhaps, and had supper in the evening, and then bed. 
But torrents of rain fell, and this idyllic garden soon became a 
swamp. I moved to another neighbouring Brigade, commanded 
by Colonel Gurko, and while I was there I dined with one of his 
batteries, a horse battery of Trans-Baikalian Cossacks. They 
asked me to stay with them for good, and I did so. The night 
after I had dined with the battery, the doctor took me to a 
church where there was a Chinese Catholic priest. His presby- 
tery was scrupulously clean, and the church was full of paper 
roses. In the presbytery sat an old bronzed Chinaman reading 
his breviary. He talked French, with a somewhat limited 
vocabulary, but with a pure French intonation, and he gave 
us a glass of fine champagne. The day after this we were 
ordered to go to Davantientung, the village I had just left. 
There we occupied a large Chinese house with a dirty yard in 
front of it . Here a new epoch began for me — life with a battery. 
The Commander of the battery, Colonel Philemonov, was 
away in hospital. His place was taken by a fat, Falstafnan, 
good-natured man, with a heart of gold, called Malinovsky, 
who knew next to nothing about gunnery. The gunnery work 
was performed by a junior Lieutenant, Kislitsky. There were 
other younger officers, a doctor, and a veterinary surgeon. We 



284 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

all lived in one room of the Chinese house ; our beds were 
stretched side by side along the K'ang — the natural platform 
of every Chinese house. We got up at sunrise, and had dinner 
at noon. Dinner consisted of huge chunks of meat, cut up and 
mixed with potatoes, and served in a pail. This dish the cook 
used to call Bozuj Strogonoff, and it was the only dish he knew. 
Sometimes the officers struck and demanded something else, 
but the dish always ended by being Bozuf Strogonoff . 

After dinner, we used to sleep on the K'ang, talk and sleep 
and then go for a walk, talk, sleep once more, and go to bed. 
The weather was very hot ; when it rained, which it did 
torrentially once every ten days, it was hotter. Every house 
you saw was made of yellow-baked mud ; on each side of you 
were endless immense stretches of giant millet fields, of an 
intense blinding green. There was an irresistible languor in 
the air. 

In the yard outside, the horses munched green beans in the 
mud. Inside the fangtse all the flies of the world seemed to have 
congregated. In spite of the heat, one took shelter under any- 
thing, even a fur rug. To eat and sleep was all one thought 
about ; but sleep was difficult and the food was monotonous 
and scanty. Insects of all kinds crawled from the dried walls 
on to one's head. Outside the window, two or three Chinese 
used to argue in a high-pitched voice about the price of some- 
thing. There was perhaps a fragment of a newspaper four 
months old which one had read and re-read. The military 
situation had been discussed until there was nothing more to 
be said. Nowhere was there any ease for the body or rest for 
the eye — an endless monotony of green and yellow ; a land 
where the rain brought no freshness and the trees afforded no 
shade. The brain refused to read ; it circled round and round 
in some fretful occupation such as half inventing an acrostic. 

When Bron Herbert read the account I wrote of life during 
this period of the war, he wrote and told me that it had vividly 
brought back to him his experiences of camp life in South 
Africa. 

" No fellow," he wrote, " who hasn't been through it can 
know what it's like. The way that everyone says exactly the 
same things that they would say if they were in London, and all 
the time they're doing most absurdly different things. The 
way that one drifts clean out of one's little circle, of which one 



RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA 285 

has formed an integral part and in which one has been absorb- 
ingly interested, and instantaneously finds oneself in another 
quite new one in which one becomes in a few seconds a vastly 
important component part and equally absorbed. The way 
in which one really spends nine-tenths of one's time sitting in 
some beastly place without shade, brushing flies off one's face, 
and somehow one isn't bored with it. The way in which all 
things which are most boring at home become most interesting 
out there. The way in which everything is rather a blurr, 
nothing very distinct but all one's sensations funny ones, quite 
new and different ; only the isolated little incidents stand out 
clear like oases. There's no general impression left. It's like 
tops of mountains sticking up through a fog." 

These are the kind of incidents I remember. One night a 
man arrived at Davantientung from Moscow. We put him up. 
When he woke up in the morning he said : "I was dreaming 
that I was going to the Art Theatre in Moscow. I had got 
tickets ; they were doing a new play by Tchekov. I wake up 
and find myself here." 

Another time a translation of H. G. Wells's Food of the 
Gods appeared in a Russian journal, and two officers fought for 
it, and rolled on the floor till the magazine was torn to bits ; 
and they neither of them wanted it really. 

The doctor of the battery and one of the young officers 
would argue about the war, about the absurdity of war ; that if 
you go to war it is silly to look after the wounded. The gospel 
of frightfulness was advocated and rejected. Endless dis- 
cussions followed. 

One evening, the Cossacks bathed their horses in a lake 
hard by and swam about naked, like Centaurs. It was 
a wonderful lake, full of pink lotus flowers, which in the 
twilight, with the rays of the new moon shining on the floating 
tangled mass of green leaf (the leaves by this time were grey 
and shimmering) and the broad pink petals of the flowers, 
made a harmony that seemed to call for the brush of some 
delicate French impressionist painter. But no painter could 
have reproduced the silvery magic of those greys and greens, 
the fantastic spectacle made by the moonlight, the twilight, the 
shining water, the dusky leaves, and the delicate lotus petals. 
Those days at Davantientung were long days. I suppose I was 
not really there a long time, but it seemed an eternity. I went 



286 . THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

back to Liaoyang in the middle of August, to post a letter, and 
then found my way back to the battery by a miracle, for they 
had moved, and I arrived at the very door of their new quarters. 
Then the long dream of the sweltering entr'acte came to an 
end. We suddenly got orders to move at two o'clock in the 
morning. We marched to a large village, and in the afternoon 
we moved on to another place where, just as I had taken the 
saddle off my pony, and was lying down in a Chinese temple, I 
heard a stir. The Japanese were reported to be less than a mile 
from us, and had entered the end of the village we had just left, 
while the dragoons were going out of the other end of it. We 
marched till midnight and then rested, and at dawn we started 
by a circuitous route for Liaoyang, which we reached about 
three o'clock in the afternoon. 



CHAPTER XV 
BATTLES 

WE established ourselves in a small village about two 
miles from the town of Liaoyang. Everything was 
calm. This was on 29th August, and a battle was 
expected on the next day. Kuropatkin was rumoured to have 
said that he would offer a tall candle to Our Lady at Moscow if 
the Japanese fought at Liaoyang. A little to the south of us 
was a large hill called So-shan-tse ; to the east a circle of hills ; 
to the north, the town of Liaoyang. A captive balloon soared 
slowly up in the twilight. It did not astonish the Chinese. 

We lay down to sleep. Nobody thought there would be a 
battle the next day. Colonel Philemonov had arrived at the 
battery the evening we left Davantientung. I had not seen 
him before, and the battery up to then had been commanded 
nominally, and in a social sense by Malinovski, but in a military 
sense by Kislitski. The first time I set eyes on Colonel Phile- 
monov was in the grey dawn in a Chinese house at the first 
place we stopped at after Davantientung. He was sitting 
at a window in a grey tunic. Being shortsighted, I mis- 
took him for one of the other officers, and I went boldty up to 
him and was about to slap him on the back when he slowly 
turned his grey-bearded face towards me and looked up in- 
quiringly with a grunt. I fled. I knew him by reputation. 
He was said to be the best artillery officer in the Siberian Army, 
and had formed the three Transbaikalian horse batteries. He 
had returned no better from the hospital, and was suffering from 
a terrible internal disease ; but nothing overcame his indomitable 
pluck. 

We had scarcely laid ourselves down to rest when we re- 
ceived orders to move to a village in the east. The horses were 
saddled, and we marched to a village on the hills east of So- 
shan-tse, about two miles off. There we once more settled 

287 



288 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

down in a Chinese house, and I fell into a heavy sleep. I was 
roused from this by the noise of rifle fire. There were faint 
pink streaks in the eastern sky. The village was on an eleva- 
tion, but around us were still higher hills. You could hear 
guns and rifles. The battle had begun. We moved out of 
the village to a hill about a hundred yards to the north-west 
of it ; here there was an open space of slopes and knolls, not 
high enough to command a view of the surrounding country. 
Two regiments of infantry were standing at ease on the hills, 
and as General Stackelberg, the Commander of the First Army, 
and his Staff rode through the village, at the foot of our knoll, 
the men saluted him, shouting the usual formula. He was 
wearing a white tunic, and I think most of the men thought 
he was the Commander-in-Chief. 

Officers stood on rocks, surveying the position through their 
glasses. The scene looked like a battle-picture : the threaten- 
ing grey sky, splashed with watery fire ; the infantry going 
into action, and the men cheering the General, as he rode along 
with his smart Staff in his spotless white tunic and gold shoulder 
straps. To complete the picture, a shell burst in a compound 
in front of us, where some dragoons had halted. Presently, we 
moved off to the west, and the battery was placed at the extreme 
edge of the plain of millet, west of the tall hill of So-shan-tse. 
Colonel Philemonov and Kislitski climbed up this hill and 
directed the fire from the top, on the right side of it, trans- 
mitting his orders by a ladder of men placed at intervals down 
the hill. The whole battle occupied an area of about 20 square 
miles. I climbed to the top of the hill. It was a grey day, 
and all you could see was a vast plain of millet. The battery 
was firing on a Japanese battery to the south-west, at a range 
of about 5000 yards. I could see the flash of the Japanese 
guns through my field-glasses when they fired. Every now 
and then you could make out in a village, or a portion of the plain 
where there was a clearing in the millet, little figures like Noah's 
Ark men, which one knew to be troops. Colonel Philemonov 
lay on the side of the hill, and with him were Kislitski and the 
doctor. The Colonel was too ill to do much himself, and, during 
the greater part of the day, it was Kislitski who gave the range. 
The Colonel was wrapped in a Caucasian cloak, and every now 
and then he checked or slightly modified Kislitski's orders. 
Kislitski was the most brilliant officer I met during the war. 



BATTLES 289 

He was cultivated and thoughtful ; he knew his business and 
loved it. It was an art to him, and he must have had the 
supreme satisfaction of the artist when he exercises his powers 
and knows that his work is good. He was absolutely fearless, 
and never thought of himself or of his career. He was re- 
sponsible for the battery's splendidly accurate firing in nearly 
every engagement. He got little credit for it, but he did not 
need it ; his wages were fully paid to him while he was at work. 
Moreover, anything that accrued to the Colonel was fully 
deserved, because he had created the battery ; the officers- 
were his pupils ; and his personal influence pervaded it. He 
was always there, and ready, if anything went badly, to sur- 
mount his physical suffering and deal with the crisis. 

The Japanese attack moved slowly like a wave from the 
south to the south-west, until in the evening, about seven o'clock,, 
they were firing west of the railway line. Three guns of the 
battery were taken and placed at the top of a small elevation 
which lay at the foot and west of So-shan-tse, and fired due west 
towards the red setting sun, over the green kowliang in which 
the Japanese infantry were advancing and breaking like a wave 
on a rock. All day long the Japanese had been firing at us, 
but the shells fell to the right of us in the millet, and on the 
evening of the first day we had no casualties of any kind. To- 
wards sunset it began to rain. I was sitting on the edge of 
a road with a young officer of the battery, a Transbaikalian 
called Hliebnikov, who had been shouting orders all day in 
command of a section. He was hoarse from shouting, and deaf 
from the noise. I was deaf too. We could neither of us hear 
what the other said, and we shared a frugal meal out of a tin 
of potted meat. A soldier near us had his pipe shot out of 
his mouth by a bullet. I shouted to him that it was rather 
a dangerous place. He shouted back that he was too hungry 
to care. By sunset the Japanese attack had been driven back.. 
From the spectator's point of view, the kowliang, the giant 
green millet, hid everything. From a hill you could see the 
infantry disappear into the kowliang ; you could hear the firing,, 
and the battle seemed to be going on underground. In the 
evening you saw the result in the stream of wounded and mangled 
men who were carried from the field to the ambulances. 

A terrible procession was wending its way to Liaoyang — 
some of the men on foot, others carried on stretchers. I met 
19 



2Q0 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

one man walking quietly. He had a bandage soaked red round 
the lower part of his face ; his tongue and lips had been shot 
away. Nightfall found us sitting on a small knoll at the base 
of So-shan-tse hill ; it had rained heavily. There was no pros- 
pect of shelter for the night. Colonel Philemonov was sitting 
wrapped up in his Caucasian cloak, tired and white ; he was in 
pain. A Cossack had been sent to a village to find a house for 
us, and to make tea. He did not come back, and Kislitski and 
I went to look for him. We came to a house in the village of 
Moe-tung and found a number of soldiers warming themselves 
round the fire. The Cossack said there was no accommodation, 
as the rooms on the left were occupied by the Japanese prisoners, 
those on the right by the Russian dead. There was a shed in 
the yard — and he pointed to it — full of refuse. This Cossack 
was an old soldier and he knew his man. Kislitski was extra- 
ordinarily fastidious about cleanliness and food. He would 
father starve than eat food which he disliked, and stand up in 
.the rain sooner than sleep in a hovel. Kislitski went away in 
•disgust. I stayed and warmed myself by the fire. Soon five 
or six officers of an infantry regiment arrived, hungry and 
drenched. The Cossack met them and told them the whole 
house had been engaged by the Commander and officers of the 
2nd Transbaikalian Battery, who would presently arrive, and 
the officers went away disgusted. 

I went back to the battery on the knoll, and it was settled 
we should remain where we were. After a while the doctor 
and Hliebnikov asked me to take them to the house to see what 
could be done. We went back and discovered lights burning 
in a room we had not been shown before, and there the Cossack 
and his friends were enjoying a plentiful supper of cheese, 
sausages, hot tea, and a bottle of vodka. There we lay down 
to sleep, but not for long ; we were wakened by bullets at one 
in the morning. The Japanese were attacking the village. I 
saddled my pony and made for my battery, but lost the way. 
I met a wounded soldier in the kowliang. He couldn't walk. 
I lifted him on to my pony, and we found a Red Cross Station 
in a Chinese temple, and the man was rebandaged. We moved 
slowly, and on the way this man said to me : " Tell me, little 
father, what made the Japanese so angry with us ? " (" Po chemu 
tak rasserdilis? "). I slept in the yard of the temple on some 
stones. Firing began again at dawn, and I soon found my way 



BATTLES 291 

back to the battery. The guns were where they had been the 
day before, but they pointed west. The Colonel and Kislitski 
were no longer on the big hill, but on the top of the smaller 
one, at the foot and to the west of it. The Japanese had 
partially regained in the night the ground they had lost in 
the day. They had got the range of our battery. One man 
was wounded soon after I arrived. I crossed the road and 
climbed the small hill. What a short time that takes to write, 
but what a long time it took to do ! An eternity. I went 
half-way across, came back, and then started again. I thought 
every shell must hit me. When I climbed the hill and found the 
Colonel and Kislitski I felt more comfortable. The Japanese 
were firing at us from a battery about two miles off. Shells 
sometimes burst on the road and in front of us. It was 
the first time I had been under shrapnel fire. The first 
time I had been under any kind of fire for any prolonged 
period. The Japanese were firing both shrapnel and shell now. 
I remember time passed quickly, as if someone had been 
turning the wheel of things at a prodigious unaccustomed 
rate. I heard that Hliebnikov had been wounded in the night 
and sent to the hospital. I stayed on the knoll till one o'clock. 
Then there was a pause. I left the knoll and sought a safer 
place near the horses ; then I went to see what was happening 
elsewhere. A long stream of wounded men was flowing to the 
Red Cross Stations and from there to Liaoyang. The noise 
was louder than ever. I started to go back to the battery, 
and met one of the officers, who told me it had been moved. 
I foolishly believed him. I learnt afterwards this was not true ; 
they stayed in their position till nine. At the end of the second 
day the Japanese were driven back two miles to the west. On 
the east they took a trench, which was never retaken. Then 
came the news of Kuroki's turning movement. On the follow- 
ing morning Liaoyang, with its triple line of defences, was left to 
defend itself, while the rest of the army crossed the river. It 
was neither a victory nor a defeat for either side. 

The battle was over but not the fighting, for all through 
the night of the 31st the Japanese attacked the forts. A 
Cossack officer, who was in one of them told me that the sight 
was terrible ; that line after line of Japanese came smiling 
up to the trenches and were mown down till the trenches were 
full of bodies, and then more came on over the bodies of the 



292 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

dead. One of the officers who was in the fort went mad from 
horror. 

I rode back towards the town in the evening ; on the 
way I met Brooke, who had been with General Stackelberg. 
We turned back to watch some regiments going into action 
towards the east, and then we rode back to Liaoyang with 
streams of ambulances, stretchers, and wounded men walking 
on foot. The terrible noise continued. 

I thought of all the heroes of the past, from the Trojan War 
onward, and of the words which those who have not fought their 
country's battles, but made their country's songs, have said 
about these men and their deeds, and I asked myself, Is that 
all true ? Is it true that these things become like the shining 
pattern on a glorious banner, the captain jewels of a great crown, 
which is the richest heirloom of nations ? Or is all this an 
illusion ? Is war an abominable return to barbarism, the 
emancipation of the beast in man, the riot of all that is bad, 
brutal, and hideous ; the suspension and destruction of civilisa- 
tion by its very means and engines ; and are those songs and 
those words which stir our blood merely the dreams of those 
who have been resolutely secluded from the horrible reality ? 
And then I thought of the sublime courage of Colonel 
Philemonov, and of the thousands of unknown men who had 
fought that day in the kowliang, without the remotest notion of 
the why and wherefore, and I thought that war is to man what 
motherhood is to woman — a burden, a source of untold suffering, 
and yet a glory. 

After the battle of Liaoyang there followed another entr'acte. 
I lost my battery and they were sent north to rest. I arrived 
at Mukden on 2nd September, and from there I went on a short 
expedition to General Miskchenko's Corps with M'Cullagh, one of 
the correspondents. Nothing of great interest happened while 
I was there, except that one day we took part in a reconnaissance. 
Later, I paid a visit to a corps on the extreme right, near Sin-min- 
tin, about twenty-six miles from Mukden. I spent a week there 
in a village with a Colonel who commanded a Cavalry Brigade. 
These were delicious days. The landscape was rich and woody ; 
the kowliang had been reaped ; there was an autumnal haze over 
the landscape and a subtle chill in the air ; the leaves were not 
yet brown, and there were no signs of decay ; but the dawns 
were chilly and the evenings short. One of the officers went 



BATTLES 293 

out shooting pheasants with his retriever every afternoon. 
Wild duck used to fly over the village in the evening, some- 
times wild geese as well, and there were wild duck in abund- 
ance on a reedy lake near the village. Someone here had 
two long books of Dostoievsky : The Idiot and The Brothers 
Karamazov. I remember devouring them both. I had only 
read Crime and Punishment up till then, and these two books 
were a revelation. I got back to Mukden at the beginning 
of October, and at the railway station I met an officer belonging 
to the battery, who told me they had just arrived from the north. 
I found them near the station, and there I met all my old friends. 
They had been right up to Kuan-chen-tse and then to Harbin 
and back. The Colonel was still an invalid and in bed. We 
moved from a cold field, where we were under canvas, into a 
temple, or rather a house inhabited by a Buddhist priest, and 
enjoyed two days of perfect calm. The building consisted of 
three quadrangles surrounded by a high stone wall. The first 
of the quadrangles was like a farmyard. There was a lot of 
straw lying about, some broken ploughshares, buckets, wooden 
bowls, spades, hoes, and other furniture of toil. A few hens 
hurried about searching for grain here and there ; a dog was 
sleeping in the sun. At the farther end of the yard a cat seemed 
to have set aside a space for its private use. This farmyard 
was separated from the next quadrangle by the house of the 
priest, which occupied the whole of the second enclosure ; that 
is to say, the living-rooms extended right round the quadrangle, 
leaving an open space in the centre. The part of the house 
which separated the second quadrangle from the next con- 
sisted solely of a roof supported by pillars, making an open 
verandah, through which, from the second enclosure, you could 
see into the third. The third enclosure was a garden with a 
square grass plot and some cypress trees. At the farthest end 
of the garden was the temple itself — a small pagoda, full of 
carved and painted idols. 

When we arrived here the priest welcomed us and estab- 
lished us in rooms in the second quadrangle. The Cossacks 
encamped in a field on the other side of the farmyard, but the 
treasure-chest was put in the farmyard itself, and a sentry stood 
near it with a drawn sword. A child moved about the place. 
He was elegantly dressed. His little eyes twinkled like onyxes, 
and his hands were beautifully shaped. This child moved 



294 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

about the farmyard with the dignity of an emperor and the 
serenity of a great pontiff. Gravely and without a smile he 
watched the Cossacks unharnessing their horses, lighting a fire, 
and arranging the officers' kit. He walked up to the sentry, 
who was standing near the treasure-chest, a big, grey-eyed 
Cossack, with a great tuft of fair hair, and the expression of a 
faithful retriever, and said : " Ping ! " in a tone of indescribable 
contempt. " Ping " in Chinese means soldier-man, and if one 
wishes to express contempt for a man there is no word in the 
whole of the Chinese language which does it so effectually. The 
Cossack smiled on the child and called him by every kind of 
endearing diminutive, but he took no notice and retired into the 
inner part of the house. The next day curiosity got the better 
of him, and one of the Cossacks — his name was Lieskov, and he 
looked after my mule — made friends with him by playing with 
the dog. The dog was dirty and distrustful and not used to 
being played with. He was too thin to be eaten. But Lieskov 
tamed this dog and taught him how to play, and the big Cossack 
used to roll on the ground, while the dog pretended to bite him. 
I remember coming home that same afternoon from a short 
stroll with one of the officers, and we found Lieskov fast asleep 
in the yard across the steps of the door, and the Chinese child 
and the dog were sitting next to him. We woke up Lieskov, 
and the officer asked him why he had gone to sleep. " I was 
playing with the dog," he said, " and I played so hard that I 
was exhausted and fell asleep." 

There was something infinitely quiet and beautiful in that 
temple, with its enclosures of trees and grass, bathed in the 
October sunshine. The time we spent there seemed very long 
and very short, like a pleasant dream. The weather was so 
soft and fine, the sunshine so bright, that had not the nights 
been chilly we should never have dreamt it was autumn. It 
seemed rather as if the spring had been unburied and had 
returned to earth by mistake. I remember one of the officers 
saying : " Thank Heavens we were in the deepest reserve." 
We seemed to be sheltered from the world in an island of dreamy 
lotus-eating ; and the only noise that reached us was the sound 
of the tinkling gongs of the temple. We lived a life of absolute 
indolence, getting up with the sun, eating, playing cards, 
strolling about on the plains, whence the millet had been reaped, 
eating again, and going to bed about nine. Then the calm was 



BATTLES 295 

suddenly broken, and we received orders to start for the front 
and join the First European Corps, which formed part of the 
reserve. 

We started for the front on the afternoon of the 6th of 
October, and we did not reach any place where fighting was 
going on till the 12th. Those intervening days were spent 
in marches and halts in Chinese villages. At one of our halting- 
places I was billeted with Kislitski, who always lived apart, 
as he could not bear the public life and the public food of a mess. 
He sat up all one night making a mysterious implement of 
wood, something to do with rectifying the angle of sight of the 
guns, and singing to himself passages from Lermontov's poem, 
" The Demon," as he worked. 

On the evening of the nth we arrived at a Chinese village, 
where to the south of us there was a range of hills which con- 
tinued like a herring-bone right on to Yantai. In these hills a 
desperate battle was going on. The battle was drawing nearer 
to us, and we were drawing nearer to the battle. Firing went 
on all night. The next day, at six o'clock in the morning, 
artillery fire began, and from a small hill in front of our position 
I got a splendid view of the fighting. The kowliang was reaped, 
and one could see to the east successive ranges of brown un- 
dulating hills, and to the west a plain black with little dots of 
infantry. In the extreme distance, to the south-west of the 
hill on which I stood, were the hills of Yantai. On a higher 
hill in front of that on which I was standing the infantry was 
taking up its position, and the Japanese shrapnel was falling 
on it. The infantry retired and moved to the south-west, and 
it looked at first as if there was going to be a general retreat. 

The firing went on without interruption until ten minutes 
to seven in the evening. In the night it rained heavily ; the 
noise of thunder was as loud as the noise of the guns. News 
of terrific fighting kept on arriving — a battery was lost and 
a regiment cut up, and the wounded began to stream past our 
camp. Rifle fire went on all night. 

The next morning punctually at half-past six the guns 
began once more. The battle had got still nearer. The shells 
were falling closer and closer. I turned round and saw through 
my field-glasses that our camp was astir. I ran back and was 
met by my Buriat servant, who was leading my pony. Shells 
began to fall on the hill where I had been standing. It was 



296 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

half-past eight in the morning, and we were just ready and 
expecting to start when we were told to remain where we were. 
The shelling stopped. A little before one o'clock a regiment 
of the First Corps which was in front of us were told to retreat. 
It was said that the enemy was beginning to turn our right 
flank. The battery were ordered to fire on a Japanese battery 
to the south-west, to cover the retreat of a Russian field battery. 

The battery went into action at twenty minutes to three. 
The guns were masked behind the houses of the village, and 
Colonel Philemonov climbed up a high tree, so as to get a better 
view. Knowing how ill he was and that he might have a 
paroxysm of pain at any moment, my blood ran cold. He could 
not see well enough from the tree, and he moved up the slope of 
the hill. He began to give out the range, but after two rounds 
had been fired he fell almost unconscious to the ground, and 
Kislitski took over. 

The Japanese were firing Shimose shells. We saw a torn 
mass of a tree or kowliang scattered into fragments by the 
explosion of a shell. But when at three o'clock we left the 
position we saw it was not kowliang nor a tree that had been 
blown up, but a man. We took up our position on another 
and higher hill, and the battery fired west, at the farthest possible 
range, on the Japanese infantry, which we could see moving 
in that direction against the horizon. This lasted till sunset. 
At dusk we marched into a village. The infantry was lying in 
trenches ready for the night attack. Some of the men had 
been killed by shells, and at the edge of a trench I saw two 
human hands. The next morning the noise of firing began at 
four o'clock. We moved into a road and waited for the dawn. 
It was dark. The firing seemed to be close by. The Cossacks 
made a fire and cooked bits of meat on a stick. At dawn, news 
came that the assault of the enemy had been repulsed and that 
we were to join later on in an attack. The Colonel went to 
look for a suitable position. I went with him. From the top 
of a high hill we could see through a glass the Japanese infantry 
climbing a hill immediately south of our former camp. The 
Japanese climbed the hill, lay down, and fired on the Russian 
infantry to the east of them. The Russians were screened from 
our sight by another hill. The battery fired at first from 
the foot of the hill, and the enemy answered back from the east 
and the west. We had to move to a position on a hill farther 



BATTLES 297 

north, whence we fired on a battery three miles off. The 
battery went into action at eight. Colonel Philemonov, 
Kislitski, and I lay on the turf at the top of the hill. Kislitski 
gave the range. The Colonel had begun to do it himself, but 
had fallen back exhausted. "I love my business," he said to 
me, " and now that I get a chance of doing it, I can't. All the 
same, they know I'm here." About an hour after the battery 
had begun to fire, the Japanese infantry came round through 
the valley and occupied a hill to the north-west of us, and 
opened fire first on our infantry, which was beneath us and in 
front of us, and then on the battery. The sergeant came and 
reported that men were being wounded and horses had been 
killed : an officer called Takmakov, who had just joined the 
battery, was wounded. The Japanese infantry were 1200 
yards from us. Three of the guns were then reversed and fired 
on the infantry. This went on till noon. You could see the 
Japanese without a glass. With a glass one could have recog- 
nised a friend. At noon the infantry retired, and we were left 
unprotected, and had to retreat at full speed under shrapnel 
and infantry fire. My pony was not anywhere near. I had 
to run. The Colonel saw this and shouted to the men to give 
me a horse, and a Cossack brought me a riderless horse, which 
was difficult to climb on to, as it had a high Cossack saddle and 
all a Cossack's belongings on it. 

We crossed the river Sha-ho, and just as everyone was 
expecting a general retreat to Mukden, we were told to recross 
the river. It began to rain. As we crossed the river, one 
of the horses had the front of its face torn off by shrapnel. 
We took up a position on the other side of the river ; the first 
few shots of the enemy fell with alarming precision on the 
battery, but the Japanese altered the range, and their shells 
fell wide. Twenty minutes later the enemy's fire ceased all 
along the line. Afterwards we knew that the reason why it 
ceased was because the Japanese had run short of ammunition. 
Kislitski and I walked towards the south to see what was going 
on. We climbed to the top of an isolated cottage, but could 
see nothing. Then we came back, and the battery set out for 
a village south-west by a circuitous route across the river. 
Nobody knew the way. We marched and marched until it 
grew dark. The Colonel was in great pain. Some Cossacks 
and Chinese were sent to find the village. We halted for an 



298 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

hour by a wet ploughed field. At last they came back "and led 
us to the village. We expected to find the transport there. 
I was hoping to find dry clothing and hot food, as we were 
drenched to the skin and half-dead with hunger and fatigue. 
When we arrived at the village I was alone with one of the 
officers ; we dismounted at a bivouac, and the officer went on 
ahead, expecting me to follow him. I thought he was to come 
back for me. I waited an hour ; nobody came ; so I started 
to look for our quarters. The village was straggling and mazy. 
I went into house after house, and only found strange faces. At 
last I got a Cossack to guide me, and, after half an hour spent 
in fruitless search, we found the house and the officers, but 
no transport, no food, and no dry clothing. I gave way to 
temper, and was publicly congratulated by the battery for doing 
so. They said that it was the first time I had manifested dis- 
content in public. 

I spent the night in the Colonel's quarters, and we discussed 
Russian literature : Dostoievsky, Gogol, and Dickens. He 
was surprised at a foreigner being able to appreciate the humour 
of Gogol. I was surprised at a foreigner, I told him, being 
able to appreciate the humour of Dickens. 

At dawn we received orders to hold ourselves ready. Half 
an hour later we were told to join the First Siberian Corps, 
which had been sent south to attack. 

We marched to a village called Nan-chin-tsa, not far from a 
hill which the Russians called Poutilov's Hill, and which the 
English called Lonely Tree Hill. It had been taken in the 
night by the Japanese. Through a glass you could see men 
walking on it, but nobody knew if they were Russians or 
Japanese. Two Cossacks were sent to find out. Wounded 
men were returning one by one, and in bigger batches, from 
every part of the field. It was a brilliant sunshiny day, and the 
wounded seemed to rise in a swarm from the earth. It was a 
ghastly sight, even worse than at Liaoyang. The bandages 
were fresh, and the blood was soaking through the shirts of the 
men. The Cossacks came back and reported that the hill was 
occupied by the Japanese. We marched back another verst 
(two-thirds of a mile) and found the corps bivouacking in the 
plain. All along the road we met wounded and mutilated men, 
some carried on stretchers and some walking, their wounds fresh 
and streaming. We marched another verst south again, and 



BATTLES 299 

the guns were placed behind the village of Fun-chu-Ling, 
two miles north of the hill to which General Poutilov gave his 
name. On the way we met General Poutilov himself and the 
infantry going into action. Colonel Philemonov and I climbed 
up on to the thatched roof of a small house, whence he gave the 
range. Kislitski was not there. In front of us was a road ; our 
house was at the extreme right corner of the village ; to the 
right of us was a field planted with lettuce and green vegetables. 
Infantry were marching along the road on their way into action. 
A company halted in the field and began eating the lettuce. 
The Colonel shouted : " You had better make haste finishing 
the green stuff there, children, as I am going to open fire." 
They hurriedly made off, as if they were to be the target, except 
one who, greedier than the rest, lingered a little behind the 
others, throwing furtive glances at the Colonel lest he should 
suddenly fire on them. The guns were in a field behind us, 
and immediately under the house where we were perched, 
two Chinamen, who had been working in the fields, had made 
themselves a dug-out, and towards tea-time they appeared from' 
the earth, made tea, and then crept back again. The battery 
opened fire, and two other batteries shelled the hill, one from the 
east and one from the west . The enemy answered with shrapnel, 
but not one of these shells touched us ; they all fell beyond us. 
A little while later, three belated men belonging to a 
line regiment walked along the road. Our guns fired a salvo r 
upon which these men, startled out of their lives, crouched 
down. The Colonel shouted to them from the roof: "Crouch 
lower or else you will be shot." They flung themselves on 
the road and grovelled in the dust. " Lower ! " shouted 
the Colonel. "Can't you get under the earth?" They 
wriggled ineffectually, and lay sprawling like brown fish out 
of water. Then the Colonel said: "You ought to be ashamed 
of yourselves. Don't you know my shells are falling three 
versts from here ? Be off ! " At sunset the battery ceased 
fire. Soon a tremendous rattle told us the infantry attack had 
begun. An officer described this afterwards as a " comb of 
fire." We waited in the dark-red, solemn twilight, and later a 
ringing cheer told us the hill had been taken. Someone who 
was with us said it was just like manoeuvres. But all was not 
over, as the Japanese counter-attacked twice. The hill was 
partly taken, but at what cost we were presently to see. 



300 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

It grew dark ; we sought and found a Chinese house to pass 
the night in. Men began to arrive from the hill, and from their 
account it was difficult to tell whether the hill had been taken or 
not. The Colonel told Hliebnikov to ride to the hill and find 
out. Hliebnikov said to me : " He is sending me to be shot 
like a dog." We were just lying down to rest when a wounded 
man arrived asking to be bandaged, then another and another. 

The doctor of the battery was with us. The nearest Red 
Cross Station was eight miles off. Soon the house was full of 
wounded, and more were arriving. They lay on the floor, on the 
K'angs, on every available place. The room was lit by one candle 
and a small Chinese oil-lamp. The men had been wounded 
by bullets and bayonets ; they were torn, mangled, soaked 
in blood. Some of them had broken limbs. Some of them had 
walked or crawled two miles from the hill, while others, unable 
to move, had been carried on greatcoats slung on rifles. When 
one house was full we went to the next, and so on, till all the 
houses in the street of the village were filled. Two of the 
officers bandaged the slightly wounded, while the doctor dealt 
with the severer wounds. The appalling part of the business 
was, that one had to turn out of the house by force men who 
were only slightly wounded or simply exhausted. Some of 
them merely asked to be allowed to rest a moment and drink 
a cup of tea, and yet they had to be turned ruthlessly from the 
door, to make room for the ever-increasing mass of maimed and 
mangled men who were crying out in their pain. As a rule the 
wounded soldiers bore their wounds with astonishing fortitude, 
but the wounded I am speaking of were so terribly mangled 
that many of them were screaming in their agony. Two officers 
were brought in. " Don't bother about us, Doctor," they said ; 
" we shall be all right." We laid these two officers down on 
the K'ang. They seemed fairly comfortable ; one of them said 
he felt cold ; and the other that the calf of his leg tingled. 
" Would I mind rubbing it ? " I lifted it as gently as I could, 
but it hurt him terribly ; and then I rubbed his leg, which he 
said gave him relief. " What are you ? " he said — " an inter- 
preter, or what ? " (I had scarcely got on any clothes ; what 
they were, were Chinese and covered with dirt.) I said I was 
a correspondent. He was about to give me something, whether 
it was a tip or a small present as a remembrance I shall never 
know, for the other officer stopped him and said : " No, no, 



BATTLES 301 

you're mistaken." He then thanked me. Half an hour later 
he died. One seemed to be plunged into the lowest inferno of 
human pain. I met a man in the street who had crawled on 
all-fours the whole way from the hill. The stretchers were all 
being used. The way in which the doctor dealt with the men 
was magnificent. He dominated the situation, encouraged 
everyone, had the right answer, suppressed the unruly, and 
cheered those who needed cheering up. 

Each house was so small, the accommodation in it so scanty, 
that it took a short time to fill, and we were constantly moving 
from one house to another. The floor was in every case so 
densely packed with writhing bodies that one stumbled over 
them in the darkness. Some of the men were sick from pain ; 
others had faces that had no human semblance at all. Horrible 
as the sight was, the piteousness of it was greater still. The 
men were touching in their thankfulness for any little attention, 
and noble in the manner they bore their sufferings. We had 
tea and cigarettes for the wounded. 

I was holding up a man who had been terribly mangled in 
the legs by a bayonet. The doctor was bandaging him. He 
screamed with pain. The doctor said the screaming upset him. 
I asked the man to try not to scream, and lit a cigarette and 
put it in his mouth. He stopped immediately and smoked, 
and remained quite still — until his socks were taken off. The 
men scarcely ever had socks ; their feet were swathed in a white 
bandage, a kind of linen puttee. This man had socks, and 
when they were taken off he cried, saying he would never see 
them again. I promised to keep them for him, and he said : 
" Thank you, my protector." A little later he died. 

When we gave the soldiers tea or cigarettes, they made the 
sign of the Cross and thanked Heaven before they thanked us. 

One seemed to have before one the symbol of the whole 
suffering of the human race : men like bewildered children, 
stricken by some unknown force for some unexplained reason, 
crying out and sobbing in their anguish, yet accepting and not 
railing against their destiny, and grateful for the slightest 
alleviation and help to them in their distress. 

We stayed till all the houses were full ; at two o'clock in 
the morning a detachment of the Red Cross arrived, but they 
had their hands full to overflowing. We went to snatch a little 
sleep. We had in the meantime heard that the hill had been 



302 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

taken, and that at dawn the next day we were to proceed 
thither. 

Before dawn I had some food in the Colonel's room. While 
I was there, he sent for the doctor. " I hear," he said, " that 
you used our bandages for the wounded who came in last night." 
The doctor said this was so. " You had no business to do 
that," said the Colonel. " I am expecting severe fighting to- 
day, and if my men are wounded I shall have no bandages for 
them." The doctor said nothing. He knew this was true ; every 
bandage had been used. " I strictly forbid you to do anything 
of the kind again," said the Colonel. The doctor saluted and 
went out. He at once rode to the nearest Red Cross Station, 
and came back with a provision of bandages later in the morning. 

At dawn we started for Lonely Tree Hill, trotting all the 
way. The road was covered with bandages ; the dead were 
lying about here and there ; but when we arrived at the hill 
the spectacle was appalling. I was the only foreigner who was 
allowed to visit the hill that day. As the Colonel rode up the 
hill we passed the body of a Japanese soldier which lay waxen 
and stiff on the side of the road, and suddenly began to move. 
The hill was littered with corpses. Six hundred Japanese dead 
were buried that day, and I do not know how many Russians. 
The corpses lay in the dawn, with their white faces and staring 
eyes like hateful waxwork figures. Even death seemed to be 
robbed of its majesty and made hideous and bedraggled by the 
fingers of war. But not entirely. Kislitski, who was with me, 
pointed to a dead Japanese officer who was lying on his back, 
and told me to look at his expression. He was lying with his 
brown eyes wide open and showing his white teeth. But there 
was nothing grim or ghastly in that smile. It was miraculously 
beautiful ; it was not the smile of inscrutable content which 
we see on certain statues of sleeping warriors such as that of 
Gaston de Foix at Milan, or Guidarello Guidarelli at Ravenna, 
but a smile of radiant joy and surprise, as if he had suddenly 
met with a friend for whom he had longed, above all things, 
at a moment when of all others he had needed him, but for 
whose arrival he had not even dared to hope. Near him a 
Russian boy was lying, fair and curly-headed, with his head 
resting on one arm, as if he had fallen asleep like a tired child 
overcome with insuperable weariness, and had opened his eyes 
to pray to be left at peace just a little longer. 



BATTLES 303 

The trenches and the ground were littered with all the belong- 
ings of the Japanese : rifles, ammunition, bayonets, leather cases, 
field-glasses, scarlet socks, dark-blue greatcoats, yellow caps, 
maps, painting-brushes, tablets of Indian ink, soap, tooth- 
brushes, envelopes full of little black pills, innumerable note- 
books, and picture postcards, received and ready for sending. 
Some of the Japanese dead wore crosses. One had a piece of green 
ribbon sewn in a little bag hanging round his neck. One had 
been shot through a postcard which he wore next to his heart. 

I saw a Russian soldier terribly wounded just as he had 
begun to eat his luncheon in the shelter of the hill. So 
many men were buried that day that the men were faint and 
nauseated by the work of burying the dead. The battle was 
over, and now there were only daily short periods of mutual 
shelling. We lived all day on the hill, and we slept in a broken- 
down house at the foot of one end of it. There were no windows 
in this house, and the doors had to be used for fuel. The nights 
were piercingly cold. The place was full of insects, and we were 
covered with lice. I lived for a week on the top of this hill 
without anything of particular interest happening, and on the 
30th of October I left with Colonel Philemonov, who had been 
ordered to Russia by the doctors. He had been getting worse, 
and could scarcely move from his bed. In spite of this he 
would get up from time to time and, muffled in a cloak, go up 
to the top of the hill. 

He was given the St. George's Cross for the battle of the 
Sha-ho. 

As we rode away he told me how he had lived with his men 
and regarded them as his children, and that it broke his heart 
to go away. He was a man of forbidding exterior, with rather 
a grim manner ; he frightened some people, but he was refined 
and cultivated, with a quiet sense of humour, the embodiment 
of unaffected courage and calm devotion to duty. The men 
worshipped him. The officers admired him, but I remember 
one day when I rejoined the battery the following year a dis- 
cussion at the Mess, when the doctor said that although he 
admired Philemonov immensely, he thought a good-natured 
officer, whom we had all known, who used frankly to go to the 
base whenever there was a chance of fighting, was superior as 
a man, a better man, and to my astonishment most of the 
^officers agreed with him. 



304 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

One curious trait about Philemonov was that he was in- 
finitely indulgent to clever scamps, if they amused him, and 
rather unfair towards conscientious dullards. He punished,, 
as some poet says somewhere, the just unwise more hardly than 
the wise unjust, and he liked being bluffed, and although he 
wasn't really taken in, he was indulgent, more than indulgent, 
to a successful piece of bluff. I arrived at Mukden on the 31st 
of October, and the battery returned on the 4th of November 
to repair the guns. We lived once more in the temple outside 
the city walls. The autumn had come and gone. It was 
winter. There had been no autumn, but a long summer and 
an Indian summer of warm, hazy days. One day the trees 
were still green, and the next the leaves had disappeared. The 
sky became grey, the snow fell, and the wind cut like a knife. 
The exquisite outlines of the country now appeared in all their 
beauty. The rare trees with their frail fretwork of branches 
stood out in dark and intricate patterns against the rosy haze 
of the wintry sunset, softened with innumerable particles of 
brown dust, and one realised whence Chinese artists drew their 
inspiration, and how the " Cunning worker in Pekin " pricked 
on to porcelain the colours and designs which make Oriental 
china so beautiful and precious. In the meantime I heard 
from the Morning Post that they no longer wanted a corre- 
spondent in Manchuria, so I decided to go home. Had I waited 
a few days longer, I could have remained correspondent for the 
Standard, but this I did not know till it was too late. I stayed 
at Mukden till the 1st of December, when I started for London. 



CHAPTER XVI 
LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 

DURING the summer of 1905 I did a certain amount of 
dramatic criticism for the Morning Post. I wrote 
notices on some of the foreign plays that were being 
given in London during that summer. Several foreign com- 
panies were with us. Duse had a season at the Waldorf Theatre ; 
Coquelin played in L'Abbe Constantin, rather a tiresome, goody- 
goody play ; Sarah Bernhardt produced Victor Hugo's Angelo,. 
I'Aiglon, Pelleas et Melisande (with Mrs. Patrick Campbell),. 
Phedre, and Adrienne Lecouvreur, not Scribe and Legouve's 
play, but a play of her own. 

I saw Duse display the full range of her powers in Alexandre 
Dumas nls' La Femme de Claude ; Goldoni's La Locandiera ; 
Dumas' Une Visite de Noces, La Dame aux Camelias, Adrienne 
Lecouvreur ; and D'Annunzio's Gioconda ; Sardou's Odette and 
Fedora. 

The most interesting of these performances was, I think, her 
Cesarine in La Femme de Claude. Duse was blamed for ap- 
pearing in a repertory of such plays. She was said to complain 
of the repertory herself. But it is doubtful whether, apart 
from all booking-office questions of popularity, she would have 
appeared to a greater advantage in plays of a more exalted 
character. Duse was not a tragic actress in the sense one 
imagines Mrs. Siddons and Rachel were tragic. She could 
not enlarge a masterpiece of poetry by her interpretation, nor 
give you a plastic poetic creation like a piece of a Greek frieze, 
as Sarah Bernhardt could and did in Phedre. She was not the 
incarnation of the tragic muse ; the gorgeous pall overwhelmed 
her ; when she played Cleopatra, for instance (Shakespeare's 
Cleopatra much mutilated), her peculiar power seemed to melt 
into thin air. I once heard a celebrated French actress, and a 
French critic, who had both only seen her play Cleopatra, wonder 
20 



306 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

what her reputation was based on. What she needed was some- 
thing between high comedy and tragedy ; and this was pre- 
cisely what she found in certain parts of the modern repertory 
of Ibsen, D'Annunzio, Sardou, Dumas fils, and Pinero, in which 
she played during that summer. 

Dumas' play, La Femme de Claude, gave her not only an 
opportunity of showing her astonishing skill, her perfect 
technique, but it revealed unguessed-of, almost incredible, 
aspects of her genius. When she played parts such as 
Sudemann's Magda and La Dame aux Camillas, one used 
to feel as if one ought not to be there ; as if one were 
peeping through a keyhole at scenes of too intimate and 
too sacred a nature for the public eye. When Amando 
hurled money and hissed vituperation at her in the fourth 
act of La Dame aux Camelias, one felt as if the police ought 
to interfere, and save so noble a creature from outrage. 
One doubted whether Duse were an artist or even an actress 
in the true sense of the word, and whether all she gave were 
not glimpses of the extraordinary nobility of her personality ; 
whether the play were not beside the question ; whether she 
might not just as well appear on the stage in her ordinary 
clothes and tell us a few confidences— her joys and her sorrows. 

But her performance in La Femme de Claude proved the 
contrary. It proved that in the subtle and objective in- 
terpretation of a definite character, a character utterly alien 
to her own nature, she could rival, if not surpass, any artist in 
the world. 

La Femme de Claude was said by Theophile de Banville to be 
a symbolic play. Call it that if you will, or call it a melodrama. 
The subject is simple and dramatic, the action rapid and 
vigorous. An austere scientific engineer called Claude has 
married an evil wife, Cesarine. She leaves him. He invents 
a new and powerful gun. She comes back. A foreign spy 
blackmails her. He threatens to make revelations about her 
to her husband, unless she obtains for him the secret of the 
gun. At first she defies this man. She says her husband 
knows all there is to be known ; he then mentions incidents 
that her husband cannot know, for the bare knowledge of them 
would make him an accessory in crime. She undertakes to get 
the secret. She tries to win back her husband, fails, and 
then shows her teeth. She sets about to seduce her husband's 



LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 307 

pupil, a young man who is already in love with her. She 
persuades him to give her the papers and her husband shoots 
her dead when they are about to elope. At first sight you 
would have thought that Duse's genius was too refined and 
too noble to render the snake-like, feline, insinuating, 
feverish, treacherous, panther-like, savage nature of Dumas' 
she-monster. Sarah Bernhardt is the artist who at once leaps 
into the mind as being suited to the part, a part that might 
have been written for her. I have seen Sarah Bernhardt play 
it and play it superbly. At certain moments she carried you 
right off your feet. 

But Duse played on the nerves till they vibrated like strings, 
in the same manner as she herself was tremulously vibrating. 
It was a gradual process of preparation, which began from the 
first moment she walked on to the stage until she fell forward 
at the end with outstretched hands when she was shot. Her 
art was like that of a cunning violinist ; the music with its 
delicately interwoven themes was phrased in subtle progress and 
with divine economy of effect, till she reached the catastrophe, 
and then Duse attained to that height where all style disappears, 
and only the perfection of art, in which all artifice is concealed, 
remains. The climax needed no effort, no strain ; it was the way 
every note had been struck before, that made it tremendous. 

Of course she transfigured Cesarine, the heroine ; in the 
modern repertory she always raised the scale of everything she 
touched, so that you cried out for her to play tragedy, and that 
was just what she could not do. She did not make Dumas' 
heroine a better woman than he intended her to be ; but she 
made her a greater woman than he can ever have hoped she 
would appear. Duse's Cesarine was wicked to the core ; not 
thoughtlessly non-moral, not invincibly ignorant in her 
wickedness, but consciously and deliberately destructive ; and 
the manifestation and expression of this unmitigated evil was 
rendered ten times more impressive by the subtlety of its 
expression and the delicate refinement which it was clothed 
with and partially disguised. Duse reminded one of Tacitus' 
description of Nero's wife, Poppaea, who, he says, professed 
virtue but practised vice ; and whose demeanour was irre- 
proachably modest. " Sermo comis nee absurdum ingenium: 
modestiam praeferre et lascivia uti." 

When she met Claude's young pupil in the first act, she gave, 



308 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

while she deliberately bewitched him, the impression that she 
was herself the victim of an ingenuous and involuntary passion. 
In the second act her appeal to her husband would have de- 
ceived any jury and most judges. The notes rang out with 
the authentic indignation of sincerity, with the seemingly un- 
mistakable agony of a victim of unjust circumstance and 
outrageous fortune ; in that long and arduous scene, in that 
tense duel, fought inch by inch between the desperate woman 
and the unrelenting man, she was a gallant, a glorious fighter 
in a losing battle; and at the last, when she saw the game 
was lost, and she allowed her true nature to show, the spectacle 
was not that of a savage beast that can do nothing but snarl 
and howl, but of a gentle animal that suddenly shows ferocious 
teeth and reveals a hellish hate. 

The finest moment of the play came after this, when she 
sets about her final capture of the young man and makes 
him deliver her husband's secret. When she triumphed and 
said the word " Vieni," it was as if one were watching some 
demi-goddess, some Circe, swoop gracefully but with terrible 
accuracy of aim on to her prey ; swift and calm in the deadly 
certainty of her stroke and of her triumph. Nobody can ever 
have acted better than Duse did at that moment. 

Duse's performance as Cesarine was the finest complete 
creative work I ever saw her do — finer, in my opinion, than her 
Magda, because in Magda she was too noble for the part, and 
rendered none of the cabotine side of the character. 

The most charming of Duse's parts was Mirandolina in 
Goldoni's comedy, La Locandiera, in which she gaily twisted 
all men round her fingers and played on their weaknesses as a 
harper on his strings. On the same day she gave this ex- 
hibition of gaiety, charm, rippling fun, and sly humour, the 
whole as easy and spontaneous and as fresh as a melody by 
Mozart, she played Lydie in Alexandre Dumas' terrible little 
masterpiece in one act, La Visite de Noces, and showed with 
unflinching truth not realism but a Tolstoy-like reality how a 
woman with despair in her soul can calmly and deliberately 
unravel the skein of man's weakness, cowardice, and infamy, 
and then spit out her disgust at it. 

In Scribe and Legouve's tinsel and lifeless melodrama... 
Adrienne Lecouvreur, she was wasting her talent, and indeed 
in her hands the greater part of the play fell flat as far as there 



LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 309 

is anything in it to fall flat. But in the death scene she re- 
vealed new phases of her genius : 

" Silver lights and darks undreamed of." 

She turned the tinsel of the play into gold by her bewilder- 
ment, when she felt the first effects of the poison, her delirium, 
when she imagined herself on the lighted stage, and by her final 
battle with Death, when she recovered her senses once more, 
in the last moments of her agony. One gasped for breath when 
she felt the first throes of the poison ; and when she became 
delirious, the surroundings seemed to fade ; we were face to face 
with a ghost ; we felt the icy wind blowing from the dark river. 

In D'Annunzio's play, La Gioconda, she might have been 
De Quincey's Our Lady of Sorrows. In Sardou's Fedora not all 
her technical skill could supply the acid necessary to make 
that particular and peculiarly constructed engine work. The 
engine was made for Sarah Bernhardt, and nobody else has ever 
succeeded in making it deliver the strong electric shock, the 
infectious thrill that it produced when Sarah Bernhardt dealt 
with it. It may not have been worth doing ; but only she could 
doit. 

Looking back on all the plays in which I saw Duse act, and 
on all the striking moments and scenes in those plays — her 
confusion when she recognised the man who had seduced her 
in Magda, the pathos of her death scene in La Dame aux 
Camelias, her withering scorn in Sardou's Odette, her irony 
in Ibsen's Doll's House, her fiendish leer of seduction and 
triumph in La Femme de Claude — there was one moment in one 
play which impressed me more than everything else. This was 
in the last act of Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, when she 
looks at herself in a hand-glass and realises that when she loses 
her looks she will have lost all. Duse looked in the glass, and 
she passed her hand over her face. It was only a flash, a flicker ; 
it only lasted a second, and yet in that second her face reminded 
me of the title of one of Kipling's stories, The Gate of the Hundred 
Sorrows. She looked suddenly, and for a second, fifty years 
older, and one felt that the act of suicide with which the play 
ends was not improbable, whatever else it might be — was, in 
fact, inevitable. 

Sarah Bernhardt, Duse, and Chaliapine were the three greatest 
artists I have seen on the stage ; for Chaliapine, in addition to 



310 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

his glorious voice and his consummate singing, is a great 
actor, and his range is prodigious. He can sing one night in 
Ivan the Terrible and freeze you to the marrow by his inter- 
pretation of the grim, half -insane, majestic, and frenzied King ; 
and the next night give you a picture of calm and serene 
saintliness in the part of the old Believer in Khovantincha ; 
or in the Barbier de Seville he can be comic with a rollicking 
gusto. Perhaps his finest part is that of Mephistopheles in 
Boito's opera. When he comes on to the stage in the first act 
disguised as a monk you feel that the devil is there, the Prince 
of Darkness, and not a fancy-dress ball Mephistopheles ; and 
in the scene on the Brocken, he looks and plays as if he 
were Milton's Satan. There is a titanic grandeur about 
him. He wears the pall of tragedy as easily as if it were 
a dressing-gown. Like all great actors, he gives you the im- 
pression that his acting is quite simple, an easy thing which 
anyone could do. If you watch him closely, it is impossible to 
detect how and when he makes a gesture or gives a look or an 
intonation. It is done before you have time to see it done. 
He told me once that his great desire and ambition was to play 
in Shakespeare ; and his Boris Godounov, in which he gave so 
ineffaceable a picture of sombre ambition, brooding fear, and 
eating remorse, indicated that he would have been magnificent 
as Othello, Richard in., or Lear. The finest acting I ever saw 
on the English stage were Irving's Becket with its sublimely 
dignified and impressive death-scene in the Cathedral ; Ellen 
Terry's Beatrice with its inspiring pace and rippling diction — 
indeed, Ellen Terry in any part, Portia, Imogen, Nance Old- 
field — Sir John Hare in the Pair of Spectacles and the Notorious 
Mrs. Ebbsmith ; Mrs. Kendal in The Likeness of the Night, and, 
for imaginative character acting, Tree as Svengali. Hare had 
the same seeming simplicity in his art, the same concealment 
of all artifice, the same undetectable con jury that struck one 
in the work of Duse, Chaliapine, Sarah Bernhardt, and all 
great actors. 

Mrs. Kendal acted so well, when she and her husband and Sir 
John Hare used to appear regularly at the St. James's Theatre, 
and people took the excellence of her acting so much for granted, 
that they tired of it. She left us. She toured in America, 
and then she came back and appeared in a play called The 
Greatest of These, at the Garrick Theatre, in June 1896 ; and 



LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 311 

Mr. Bernard Shaw, in his notice of the play, said : " Mrs. Kendal, 
forgetting that London playgoers have been starved for years 
in the matter of acting, inconsiderately gave them more in the 
first ten minutes than they have had in the last five years, 
with the result that the poor wretches became hysterical and 
vented their applause in sobs and shrieks. And yet in the old 
days at the St. James's they would have taken it as a matter of 
course and perhaps grumbled at the play into the bargain." 

But of all my playgoing, I think what I enjoyed most of all 
was a summer troupe at the Arena Nazionale in Florence, in the 
summer of 1893. The troupe was an ordinary one ; but they 
produced a different play every night ; and I there saw nearly 
all the plays worth seeing in the European repertory, including 
Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dumas, Sardou, Maupassant, Sudermann — 
besides many Italian plays. The seats were cheap ; smoking 
was allowed. The auditorium was open to the sky. The 
Italians acted so naturally, and so easily, that they were more 
like children improvising charades than professionals working 
for their bread ; and among them was an actor who made a 
great name for himself later — Zacchoni. I remember that 
when I came back to London and went to a play for the first 
time, the diction of the English players seemed so stilted, 
laborious, and artificial, after these easy, babbling Italians, 
that I felt as if it was in London and not in Florence that I had 
been listening to a foreign language. 

At the end of the summer of 1905 I went back to Manchuria. 
I spent a few days in St. Petersbtirg, and then I embarked 
once more in the Transbaikalian railway. The journey was 
pleasantly different from what it had been in 1904, and almost 
as interesting in another way. An officer of the German 
forestry, and a friend of a Hildesheim friend of mine — Erich 
Wippern — was in the train. He was reading the second part of 
Goethe's Faust. I shared a compartment with an army doctor. 
We crossed Lake Baikal in a steamer. It was blue, and there 
was nothing of the ghostly unreal look about it that it wears in 
the winter. Kharbin was changed beyond recognition. The 
town was twice as big and seemed to be almost deserted. 
General Linevitch, the new Commander-in-Chief, did not 
allow officers to go there any more except on pressing errands 
and for good reasons. I spent a few days there, and I got to 
know some of the local officers, among others a charming General 



312 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Zacharoff who was in charge of the demobilisation. I found 
myself suddenly plunged into a new society which was not 
unlike what Chekhov depicts in his plays. A small drama 
was progressing round the wife of a local engineer, who was 
the Circe of the place. She was not particularly beautiful, but 
she did what she liked with whomsoever she pleased. There 
were quarrels, duels arranged, suicides threatened, revolvers 
fired ; the whole ending in conversation and cigarette smoke — 
just as in a Chekhov play, of which the motto might have 
been: " L'amour passe ; lafumeereste." 

On ist September peace was declared, and the soldiers 
in the place tore the telegram from one another's hands. 

I went to Gunchuling, which was the remoter G.H.Q. of the 
army, and I stayed with the Press censors. Although peace had 
been declared, an officer whom I knew got orders to go and 
fortify positions, and Kuropat kin's army was said to have 
received orders to advance. At the time this seemed inex- 
plicable. The reason of this was, I learnt a long time after- 
wards, that news had been received of a revolution in Japan. 

From Gunchuling I went to Godziadan, which was the 
advanced G.H.Q. where the Commander-in-Chief lived in a 
train. I had telegraphed from Gunchuling to the 2nd Trans- 
baikal battery, asking them to send horses to fetch me. The 
battery was in Mongolia, at a place called Jen-tsen-Tung, on the 
extreme right flank of the army and eighty miles from Godziadan. 
Two Cossacks arrived with a pony for me and my own saddle 
on it, and we started at eight o'clock in the morning on our 
long and exhausting ride. 

We spent the first night at the Chinese town of Ushitai, 
and halted for our midday meal the next day at a Chinese village, 
a small tumble-down place near a large clump of trees. A 
Chinaman came out of the house and, seeing the red brassard of 
the correspondents on my arm, thought I was a doctor. In 
pidgin Russian he told me his child was ill ; and leading me into 
his house he showed me a brown and naked infant with a fat 
stomach. The infant had a white tongue and had been feeding, 
so the Chinaman told me, on raw Indian corn. I prescribed 
•cessation of diet, and the Chinaman seemed to be satisfied, and 
asked me whether I would like to hear a concert. I said : " Very 
much " ; he then bade me sit down on the K'ang and said : 
** Smotri, smotri " (" Look, look "). Presently another Chinaman 



LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 313 

came into the room, and taking from the wall a large and twisted 
clarion made of brass, he blew on it one deafening blast and hung 
it up on the wall again. There was a short pause. I waited in 
expectation, and the Chinaman turned to me and said : " The 
concert is now over." I then went to have luncheon with the 
Cossacks under the trees, the meal consisting of rusks as hard 
as bricks swimming in an earthen bowl of boiling water, on the 
surface of which tea was sprinkled. When we had finished our 
meal, and just as we were about to start, the Chinaman in whose 
house I had been entertained, rushed up to me and said : " In 
your country, when you go to a concert, do you not pay for it ? " 
The concert was paid for, and we rode on. We rode through 
grassy and flowery steppes : this was the beginning of Mongolia. 
We met Mongols sitting sideways on their ponies and dressed in 
coats of many colours, and we arrived at Jen-tsen-Tung at eight 
o'clock. There I found my old friend Kislitski of the battery, 
who was living in an immaculately clean Chinese house, and 
there I dined and spent the night. The next morning I rode to 
a village two miles off, where the battery was quartered. There 
I stayed from the 15th of September until the 1st of October, 
living a life of ease and interest. The village where we were 
quartered was picturesque. It lay in a clump of willow trees, 
and near it there was a large wood which stretched down to a 
broad brown river. Next door to us lived a Chinaman who was 
preparing three young students for their examination in Pekin. 
He was an amiable and urbane scholar, and he used to put on 
large horn spectacles and chant the most celebrated stop-shorts 
in Chinese literature. Stop-shorts are Chinese poems in four 
lines. They are called stop-shorts because the sense goes on 
when the sound stops. 

We spent the time in riding, reading, bathing, sleeping, and 
playing patience. 

Jen-tsen-Tung was a large and picturesque town ; a stream 
of Mongols flowed in and out of it, wearing the most picturesque 
clothes — silks and velvets of deep orange and sea-green that 
glowed like jewels. At one of the street corners a professional 
wizard, dressed in black silk, embroidered with silver moons 
and wearing a black conical hat, practised his trade. You 
asked a question, paid a small sum, and he told you the answer 
to the question ; but he refused to prophesy for more than a 
hundred days ahead. 



314 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

The evenings in our quarters were beautiful. The sky 
would have a faint pinky-mauve tinge, like a hydrangea, and a 
large misty moon hung over the delicate willow trees that were 
silvery and rustled faintly in the half light. From the yard 
would float the sounds of music, music played on a one-stringed 
instrument and accompanying a wailing song, an infinitely 
melancholy music, less Oriental than Chinese music, and more 
Eastern than Russian music. 

I left this dreamy paradise on the 1st of October, and I 
arrived at Kharbin on the 7th of October. 

At Jen-tsen-Tung I had consulted the magician who practised 
his arts in the street about my journey home. His answer was 
that I could go home by the west or by the east ; west would be 
better, but I should meet with obstacles. His prophecy came 
true, but the obstacles did not begin till we arrived at Samara. 
I was in the Trans-Siberian express. There were on board the 
train some officers, a German savant, two German men of 
commerce, three Americans — who were on their way back from 
Siberia, where they had managed a mine — a Polish student, and 
some ladies. I shared a compartment with Alexander Dimi- 
triev-Mamonov, whose acquaintance I had made at Kharbin. 
He was the landlord of a small property near Kirsanov. During 
the war he had been employed in the Russo-Chinese Bank at 
Port Arthur, where he had worked during the daytime. At 
night he had served in the trenches. He spoke English per- 
fectly, although he had never been to England. The first part 
of the journey was uneventful, and nothing of interest happened 
till we arrived at Irkutsk, except that the German man of com- 
merce had a violent quarrel with one of the officers because he 
did not take off his hat in the restaurant car, in which there was 
a portrait of the Emperor. Had the German been a little better 
versed in Russian law, he would have known that a recent 
decree had made this salutation unnecessary ; as it was, he 
gave in and submitted to the incident being written down in 
a protocol. 

While we were quietly travelling, the Russian revolution 
had begun. The first news of it came to me in the following 
manner. We had crossed the Urals, and we had been travelling 
thirteen days ; we had arrived at Samara, when the attendant, 
who looked after the first-class carriages, came into my com- 
partment and heaved a sigh. I asked him what was the matter. 



LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 315 

" We shan't get farther than Toula," he said. " Why ? " I 
asked. " Because of the unpleasantnesses " (niepriatnosti) . 
I asked, " What unpleasantnesses ? " " There is a mutiny," 
he said, " on the line." We passed the big station of Sisran 
and arrived at the small town of Kousnetsk, which was no bigger 
than a village. There we were told the train could not go any 
farther because of the strike. 

We expected an ordinary railway strike, which would mean at 
the most a delay of a few hours. We got out and walked about 
the platform. By the evening the passengers began to show signs 
of restlessness. Most of them sent long telegrams to various 
authorities. They drew up a petition in the form of a round- 
robin, which was telegraphed to the Minister of Ways and Com- 
munications, saying that an express train full of passengers, 
extremely over-tired by a long and fatiguing journey, was 
waiting at Kousnetsk, and asking the Minister to be so good as to 
arrange for them to proceed farther. This telegram remained 
unanswered. The next day resignation seemed to come over the 
company, although innumerable complaints were voiced, such 
as, " Only in Russia could such a disgraceful thing happen," 
and one of the passengers suggested that Prince Kilkov's 
portrait, which was hanging in the dining-car, should be turned 
face to the wall. Prince Kilkov had built the railway, and 
was at that moment driving an engine himself from Moscow 
to St. Petersburg, as no trains were running. He was over 
seventy years old. The Polish student, who had made music 
for the Americans, playing by ear the accompaniment to any 
tune they whistled him, and many tunes from the repertory 
of current musical comedy, played the pianoforte with ex- 
aggerated facility and endless fioriture and runs. I asked an 
American mechanic who was travelling with the mining managers, 
whether he liked the music. He said he would like it if the 
" damned hell were knocked out of it," which was exactly my 
feeling. On the second day after our arrival, my American 
friends left for Samara with the intention of proceeding thence 
by water to St. Petersburg. I have wondered ever since how 
long the journey took them, and whether they found a steamer. 
As it was, their departure was not without a comic element. 
This is what happened. They were talking frankly about 
the supine inertia of the Russians when faced with an emergency, 
and were pointing out how different were the ever-ready 



316 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

presence of mind and the instant translation of ideas into 
action that marked men of their own country. They added 
that they had lost no time in chartering the best horses in the 
town, and were starting for Samara in an hour's time. They 
were not going to take things lying down. While they were 
telling us this in the restaurant car, a minor, very minor 
and rather shabby, Russian official was sitting in the corner 
of the car saying nothing and drinking tea. It turned out 
he had overheard and understood the conversation of the 
Americans, for, when they carried their luggage to where 
they expected their frisky Troika to be, it was there indeed, 
but they had the mortification of seeing the little official already 
inside it , galloping off and waving them a friendly farewell. They 
had to be content with an inferior equipage and a later start. 

The passengers spent the time in exploring the town, 
which was somnolent and melancholy. Half of it was built 
on a hill, a typical Russian village — a mass of squat brown 
huts ; the other half in the plain was like a village in any other 
country. The idle guards and railway officials sat on the steps 
of the station room whistling. Two more trains arrived — 
a Red Cross train and a slow passenger train. Passengers 
from these trains wandered about the platform, mixing with 
the idlers from the town. A crowd of peasants, travellers, 
engineers and Red Cross attendants, sauntered up and down 
in loose shirts and big boots, munching sunflower seeds and 
spitting out the husks till the platform was thick with 
refuse. A doctor who was in our train, half a German, with 
an official training and an orthodox mind, talked to the 
railway servants like a father. It was wrong to strike, he 
said. They should have put down their grievances on paper 
and had them forwarded through the proper channels. The 
officials said that would have been waste of ink and penmanship. 
" I wonder they don't kill him," Mamonov said to me, and I 
agreed. Each passenger was given a rouble a day to buy food. 
The third-class passengers were given checks, in return for which 
they could receive meals. However, they deprecated the plan 
and said they wanted the amount in beer. They received it. 
They then looted the refreshment room, broke the windows, and 
took away the food. This put an end to the check system. 
The feeling among the first-class passengers rose. Something 
ought to be done, was the general verdict ; but nobody quite 



LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 317 

knew what. They felt that the train ought to be placed in a 
safe position. The situation on the evening of the second day 
began to be like that described in Maupassant's story, Boule de 
Suif. Nothing could be done except to explore the town of 
Kousnetsk. There was a feeling in the air that the normal 
conditions of life had been reversed. The railway officials and 
the workmen smiled ironically, as much as to say, "It is our 
turn now," but the waiter in the restaurant car went on serving 
the aristocracy, which was represented by a lady in a tweed coat 
and skirt, and two old gentlemen, first. The social order might 
be overturned, but, though empires might crash and revolu- 
tions convulse the world, he was not going to forget his place. 

It was warm autumn weather. The roads were soft and 
muddy, and there was a smell of rotting leaves in the air. It 
was damp and grey, with gleams of weak, pitiful sunshine. In 
the middle of the town there was a large market-place, where a 
brisk trade in geese was carried on. One man whom I watched 
failed to sell his geese during the day, and while driving them 
home at sunset talked to them as if they were dogs, saying : 
" Cheer up, we shall soon be home." A party of convicts who 
belonged to the passenger train were working not far from the 
station, and asked the passers-by for cigarettes, which were 
freely given to the " unfortunates," as convicts were called in 
Russia. I met them near the station, and they at once said : 
" Give the unfortunates something." Towards evening, in 
one of the third-class carriages, a party of Little Russians, Red 
Cross orderlies, sang together in parts, and sometimes in rough 
counterpoint, melancholy, beautiful songs with a strange 
trotting rhythm with no end^and no beginning, or rather ending 
on the dominant as if to begin again, and opposite their carriage 
on the platform a small crowd of muzhiks gathered together 
and listened and praised the singing. 

On the morning of the fourth day after we had arrived, the 
impatience of the passengers increased to fever pitch. A Colonel, 
who was with us and who knew how to use the telegraph, 
communicated with Pensa, the next big station. Although 
the telegraph clerks were on strike, they remained in the offices 
talking to their friends on the wire all over Russia. The strikers 
were civil. They said they had no objection to the express 
going farther ; that they would neither boycott nor beat anyone 
who took us, and that if we could find a friend to drive the 



318 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

engine, well and good. We found a friend, an amateur engine- 
driver, who was willing to take us, and on the 28th of October 
we started for Pensa. We had not gone far before the engine 
broke down. Directly this happened all the passengers offered 
advice about the mending of it. One man produced a piece of 
string for the purpose. But another engine was found, and we 
arrived at last at Pensa. There, I saw in the telegrams the 
words " rights of speech and assembly," and I knew that the 
strike was a revolution. At Pensa the anger of the soldiers 
whose return home from the Far East had been delayed was 
indescribable. They were lurching about the station in a state 
of drunken frenzy, using unprintable language about strikes 
and strikers. 

We spent the night at Pensa. The next morning we started 
for Moscow, but the train came to a dead stop at two o'clock 
the next morning at Riazhk, and when I woke up, the attendant 
came and said we should go no farther until the unpleasantnesses 
were over. But an hour later news came that we could go to 
Riazan in another train. Riazan Station was guarded by 
soldiers. A train was ready to start for Moscow, but one had 
to join in a fierce scrimmage to get a place in it. I found a 
place in a third-class carriage. Opposite me was an old man 
with a grey beard. He attracted my attention by his courtesy. 
He gently prevented a woman with many bundles being 
turned out of the train by another muzhik. I asked him where 
he had come from. " Eighty versts the other side of Irkutsk," 
he said. " I was sent there, and now after thirteen years I am 
returning home at the Government's expense. I was a convict." 
" What were you sent there for ? " I asked. " Murder ! " he 
answered softly. The other passengers asked him to tell 
his story. " It's a long story," he said. " Tell it ! " shouted 
the other passengers. His story was this. He had got drunk, 
set fire to a barn, and when the owner had interfered he killed 
him. He had served a sentence of two years' hard labour and 
eleven years of exile. He was a gentle, humble creature, with 
a mild expression, and he looked like an apostle. He had no 
money, and lived on what the passengers gave him. I gave 
him a cigarette. He smoked a quarter of it, and said he would 
keep the rest for the journey, as he had still three hundred miles 
to travel. We arrived at Moscow at 11 o'clock in the evening 
and found the town in darkness, save for a glimmer of oil 



LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 319 

lamps. The next morning we woke up to find that Russia 
had been given a charter which contained not a Constitution, 
as many so rashly took for granted, but the promise of Con- 
stitutional Government. 

I stayed at the Hotel Dresden, which when I arrived was 
still without lamps or light of any kind, and the lift was not 
working. 

The first thing which brought home to me that Russia had 
been granted the promise of a Constitution was this. I went 
to the big Russian baths. Somebody came in and asked for 
some soap, upon which the barber's assistant, aged about ten, 
said, with the air of a Hampden : " Give the citizen some soap " 
("Daite grazhdaninu mwilo "). Coming out of the baths I found 
the streets decorated with flags and everybody in a state of 
frantic and effervescing enthusiasm. I went to one of the big 
restaurants. There old men were embracing each other and 
drinking the first glass of vodka to free Russia. After luncheon 
I went out into the theatre square. There is a fountain in it, 
which forms an excellent public platform. An orator mounted 
it and addressed the crowd. He began to read the Emperor's 
Manifesto. Then he said : " We are all too much used to the 
rascality of the Autocracy to believe this ; down with the 
Autocracy ! " The crowd, infuriated — they were evidently 
expecting an enthusiastic eulogy — cried: "Down with you ! " 
But instead of attacking the speaker who had aroused their 
indignation they ran away from him ! It was a curious sight. 
The spectators on the pavement were seized with panic and 
ran too. The orator, seeing his speech had missed fire, changed 
his tone and said : " You have misunderstood me." But what 
he had said was perfectly clear. This speaker was an ordinary 
Hyde Park orator. University professors spoke from the same 
platform. Later in the afternoon a procession of students 
arrived opposite my hotel with red flags and collected 
outside the Governor-General's house. The Governor-General 
appeared on the balcony and made a speech, in which he said 
that now there were no police he hoped that they would be able 
to keep order themselves. He asked them also to exchange the 
red flag, which was hanging on the lamp-post opposite the 
Palace, for the national flag. One little student climbed like 
a monkey up the lamp-post and hung a national flag there, 
but did not remove the red flag. Then the Governor asked 



320 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

them to sing the National Anthem, which they did ; and as. 
they went away they sang the " Marseillaise " : 

" On peut tres bien jouer ces deux airs a la fois 
Et cela fait un air qui fait sauver les rois." 

At one moment a Cossack arrived, but an official came out 
of the house and told him he was not needed, upon which he 
went away, amidst the jeers, cheers, hoots, and whistling of 
the crowd. On the whole, the day passed off quietly.. 
There were some tragic incidents : the death of a woman, 
the wounding of a student and a workman who tried to rescue 
the student from the prisoners' van, and the shooting of a 
veterinary surgeon called Bauman. 

While I was standing on the steps of the hotel in the after- 
noon a woman rushed up frantically and said the Black Gang, 
were coming. A student who came from a good family and 
who was standing by explained that the Black Gang were roughs 
who supported the autocracy. His hand, which was bandaged,, 
had been severely hurt by a Cossack, who had struck it with his 
whip, thinking he was about to make a disturbance. He came- 
up to my room, and from the hotel window we had a good view 
of the crowd, which proceeded to 

" Attaquer la Marseillaise en la 
Sur les cuivres, pendant que la flute soupire, 
En bi bemol : ' Veillons au salut de l'Empire.' " 

That night I dined at the Metropole Restaurant, and a. 
strange scene occurred. At the end of dinner the band played 
the " Marseillaise," and after it the National Anthem. Every- 
body stood up except one mild-looking man with spectacles,, 
who went on calmly eating his dinner; upon which a man 
who was sitting at the other end of the room, rather drunk, 
rushed up to him and began to pull him about and drag 
him to his feet. He made a display of passive resistance, which 
proved effectual, and when he had finished his dinner he went 
away. 

The outward aspect of the town during these days was 
strange. Moscow was like a besieged city. Many of the shops 
had great wooden shutters. Some of the doors were marked 
with a large red cross. The distress, I was told, during the 
strike had been terrible. There was no light, no gas, no water ; 
all the shops were shut ; provisions and wood were scarce:.. 



LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 321 

On the afternoon of 2nd November I went to see Bauman's 
funeral procession, which I witnessed from many parts of the 
town. It was an impressive sight. A hundred thousand men 
took part in it. The whole of the Intelligentsia was in the 
streets or at the windows. The windows and balconies were 
crowded with people. Order was perfect. There was not a 
hitch nor a scuffle. The men walking in the procession were 
students, doctors, workmen — people in various kinds of uniform. 
There were ambulances, with doctors dressed in white in them, 
in case there should be casualties. The men carried great red 
banners, and the coffin was covered with a scarlet pall. As 
they marched they sang in a low chant the " Marseillaise," 
" Viechni Pamiat," and the " Funeral March " x of the fighters 
for freedom. This last tune is most impressive. From a 
musician's point of view it is, I am told, a bad tune ; but then, 
as Du Maurier said, one should never listen to musicians on the 
subject of music any more than one should listen to wine mer- 
chants on the subject of wine. But it is the tune which to my 
mind exactly expressed the Russian Revolution, with its dogged 
melancholy and invincible passion. It was as befitting as the 
" Marseillaise " (which, by the way, the Russians sang in parts 
and slowly) was inappropriate. The " Funeral March " had 
nothing defiant in it ; but it is one of those tunes which, when 
sung by a multitude, makes the flesh creep ; it is common- 
place, if you will ; and it expresses — as if by accident — the 
commonplaceness of all that is determined and unflinching, 
mingled with an accent of weary pathos. As it grew dark, 
torches were brought out, lighting up the red banners and the 
scarlet coffin of the unknown veterinary surgeon, who in a 
second, by a strange freak of chance, had become a hero, or 
rather a symbol ; an emblem and a banner, and who was being 
carried to his last resting-place with a simplicity which eclipsed 
the pomp of royal funerals, and to the sound of a low song 
of tired but indefatigable sadness, stronger and more formidable 
than the paeans which celebrate the triumphs of kings. 

The impression left on my mind by this funeral was deep. 

1 By a strange irony of fate, this tune, which the revolutionaries 
have made their own, was originally an official tune, composed probably 
by some obscure military bandmaster, and played at the funerals of 
officers and high officials. It became afterwards the national anthem 
of the Bolsheviks. 
21 



322 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

As I saw these hundred thousand men march past so quietly, 
so simply, in their bourgeois clothes, singing in careless, almost 
conversational, fashion, I seemed nevertheless to hear the 
" tramping of innumerable armies," and to feel the breath 

of the — 

" Courage never to submit or yield, 
And what is else not to be overcome." 

After Bauman's funeral, which had passed off without an in- 
cident, at eleven o'clock a number of students and doctors were 
shot in front of the University, as they were on their way home, 
by Cossacks, who were stationed in the Riding School, opposite 
the University. The Cossacks fired without orders. They 
were incensed, as many of the troops were, by the display of 
red flags, and the processions. 

The day after Bauman's funeral (3rd November) was the 
anniversary of the Emperor's accession, and all the " hooligans " 
of the city, who were now called the " Black Gang," used the 
opportunity to make counter demonstrations under the aegis 
of the national flag. The students did nothing ; they were in 
no way aggressive ; but the hooligans when they came across 
students beat them and in some cases killed them. The 
police did nothing ; they seemed to have disappeared. These 
hooligans paraded the town in small groups, sometimes uniting, 
blocking the traffic, demanding money from well-dressed people, 
wounding students, and making themselves generally objection- 
able. When the police were appealed to they shrugged their 
shoulders and said : " Liberty." The hooligans demanded 
the release of the man who had killed Bauman. " They have 
set free so many of their men," they said, referring to the re- 
volutionaries, " we want our man set free." The town was in 
a state of anarchy ; anybody could kill anyone else with im- 
punity. In one of the biggest streets a hooligan came up to 
a man and asked him for money ; he gave him ten kopecks. 
" Is that all ? " said the hooligan. " Take that," and he killed 
him with a Finnish knife. I was myself stopped by a band on 
the Twerskaia and asked politely to contribute to their fund — 
the fund of the " Black Gang " — which I did with considerable 
alacrity. Students, or those whom they considered to be 
students in disguise, were the people they mostly attacked. 
The citizens of the town in general soon began to think that 
this state of things was intolerable, and vigorous representations 



LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 323 

were made to the town Duma that some steps should be taken 
to put an end to it. The hooligans broke the windows of the 
Hotel Metropole and those of several shops. Liberty meant to 
them doing as much damage as they pleased. This state of 
things lasted three days, and then it was stopped— utterly and 
completely stopped. A notice was published forbidding all 
demonstrations in the streets with flags. The police reappeared, 
and everything resumed its normal course. These bands of 
hooligans were small and easy to deal with. The disorders 
were unnecessary. But they did some good in one way: 
they brought home to everybody the necessity for order and 
the maintenance of order, and the plain fact that removal of 
the police meant anarchy. 

In spite of all this storm and stress the theatres were doing 
business as usual, and at the Art Theatre I saw a fine and 
moving performance of Tchekov's Chaika and also of Ibsen's 
Ghosts. On 7th November I went to see a new play by Gorky, 
which was produced at the Art Theatre. It was called The 
Children of the Sun. It was the second night that it had been 
performed. M. Stanislavsky, one of the chief actors of the 
troupe and the stage manager, gave me his place. The theatre 
was crammed. There is a scene in the play where a doctor, 
living in a Russian village, and devoting his life to the welfare 
of the peasants, is suspected of having caused an outbreak 
of cholera. The infuriated peasants pursue the doctor and 
bash someone on the head. On the first night this scene 
reduced a part of the audience to hysterics. It was too 
" actual." People said they saw enough of their friends killed 
in the streets without going to the play for such a sight. On the 
second night it was said that the offensive scene had been sup- 
pressed. I did not quite understand what had been eliminated. 
As I saw the scene it was played as follows : A roar is heard as 
of an angry crowd. Then the doctor runs into a house and hides. 
The master of the house protests ; a peasant flies at his throat 
and half strangles him until he is beaten on the head by another 
peasant who belongs to the house. The play was full of in- 
teresting moments, and was played with finished perfection. 
But Gorky had not M. Tchekov's talent of representing on the 
stage the uneventful passage of time, the succession of the seem- 
ingly insignificant incidents of people's everyday lives, chosen 
with such skill, depicted with such an instinct for mood and 



324 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

atmosphere that the result is enthrallingly interesting. Gorky's 
plays have the faults and qualities of his stories. They are un- 
equal, but contain moments of poignant interest and vividness. 

The next night (8th November) I went to St. Petersburg. 
There I saw Spring-Rice, Dr. Dillon, and heard Fidelio at the 
opera. The young lions in the gallery did not realise that 
Fidelio is a revolutionary opera and the complete expression 
of the " Liberation movement " in Germany. 

A Post Office strike, followed by a strike of other unions, 
was going on, and one night while I was at the Op£ra Bouffe, 
where the Country Girl was being given, the electric light went 
out. The performance continued all the same, the actors 
holding bedroom candles in their hands, while the auditorium 
remained in the dimmest of twilights. 

I stayed in St. Petersburg till the 21st of November, when 
I went to London. I travelled to the frontier with a Japanese 
Military Attache and a Russian student. We three passengers 
had a curious conversation. The Japanese gentleman rarely 
spoke, but he nodded civilly, and made a sneezing noise every 
now and then. The student talked of English literature with 
warm enthusiasm. His two favourite English modern authors 
were Jerome K. Jerome and Oscar Wilde. When I showed 
some surprise at this choice, he said I probably only thought 
of Jerome as a comic author. I said that was the case. 
" Then," he said, " you have not read Paul Clever, which is 
a masterpiece, a real human book — a great book." 

When we got out at the frontier the Japanese officer wanted 
to fetch something but as there was no porter in sight, was 
loath to leave his bag. The student offered to keep watch 
over it, but the Japanese would not trust him to do this, and 
stood by his bag till a porter arrived. The student was 
astonished and slightly hurt. 

After I had stayed a little over a fortnight in London I 
went back first to St. Petersburg, then to Moscow. 

I had not been two days in Moscow before there was 
another strike. It began on Wednesday, the 20th of December, 
punctually at midday. The lift ceased working in the hotel, 
the electric light was turned off, and I laid in a large store of 
books and cigarettes against coming events. The strike was 
said to be an answer to the summary proceedings of the Govern- 
ment and its action in arresting leaders of the revolutionary 



LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 325 

committee. Its watchword was to be : "A Constituent 
Assembly based upon universal suffrage." Beyond the electric 
light going out, nothing happened on this day. On Thursday, 
the 21st, most of the shops began to shut. The man who 
cleaned the boots in the hotel made the following remark : 
" I now understand that the people exercise great power." I 
heard a shot fired somewhere from the hotel at nine o'clock 
in the evening. I asked the hall porter whether the theatres 
were open. He said they were shut, and added : " And who 
would dream of going to the theatre in these times of stress ? " 

The next day I drove with Marie Karlovna von Kotz into 
the country to a village called Chernaya, about twenty-five 
versts from Moscow on the Novgorod road, which before the 
days of railways was famous for its highway robberies and 
assaults on the rich merchants by the hooligans of that day. 
We drove in a big wooden sledge drawn by two horses, the 
coachman standing up all the while. We went to visit two 
old maids, who were peasants and lived in the village. One 
of them had got stranded in Moscow, and, owing to the railway 
strike, was unable to go back again, and so we took her with 
us ; otherwise she would have walked home. We started 
at 10.30 and arrived at 1.30. The road was absolutely still 
— a thick carpet of snow, upon which fresh flakes drifting in 
the fitful gusts of wind fell gently. Looking at the drifting 
flakes which seemed to be tossed about in the air, the first 
old maid said that a man's life was like a snowflake in the 
wind, and that she had never thought she would go home 
with us on her sister's name-day. 

When we arrived at the village we found a meal ready for 
us, which, although the fast of Advent was being strictly 
observed and the food made with fasting butter, was far from 
jejune. It consisted of pies with rice and cabbage inside, 
and cold fish and tea and jam, and some vodka for me — the 
guest. The cottage consisted of one room and two very small 
ante-rooms — the walls, floors, and ceilings of plain deal. Five 
or six rich ikons hung in the corner of the room, and a coloured 
oleograph of Father John of Kronstadt on one of the walls. 
A large stove heated the room. Soon some guests arrived 
to congratulate old maid No. 2 on her name-day, and after 
a time the pope entered, blessed the room, and sat down to 
tea. We talked of the strike, and how quiet the country was, 



326 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

and of the hooligans in the town. " No," said the pope, with 
gravity, " we have our own hooligans." A little later the 
village schoolmaster arrived, who looked about twenty years 
old, and was a little tiny man with a fresh face and gold-rimmed 
spectacles, with his wife, who, like the aesthetic lady in Gilbert 
and Sullivan's Patience, was " massive." I asked the pope 
if I could live unmolested in this village. He said : " Yes ; 
but if you want to work you won't be quiet in this house, 
because your two hostesses chatter and drink tea all day 
and all night." At three o'clock we thought we had better 
be starting home ; it was getting dark, the snow was falling 
heavily. The old maids said we couldn't possibly go. We 
should (i) lose our way ; (2) be robbed by tramps ; (3) be 
massacred by strikers on the railway line ; (4) not be allowed 
to enter the town ; (5) be attacked by hooligans when we reached 
the dark streets. We sent for Vassili, the coachman, to consult 
with him. " Can you find your way home ? " we asked. 
" Yes, I can," he said. " Shall we lose our way ? " " We 
might lose our way — it happens," he said slowly — " it happens 
times and again ; but we might not — it often doesn't happen." 
" Might we be attacked on the way ? " " We might — it 
happens — they attack ; but we might not — sometimes they 
don't attack." " Are the horses tired ? " " Yes, the horses 
are tired." " Then we had better not go." " The horses 
can go all right," he said. Then we thought we would stay ; 
but Vassili said that his master would curse him if he stayed 
unless we " added " something. 

So we settled to stay, and the schoolmaster took us to see 
the village school, which was clean, roomy, and altogether 
an excellent home of learning. Then he took us to a neigh- 
bouring factory which had not struck, and in which he presided 
over a night class for working men and women. From here 
we telephoned to Moscow, and learned that everything was 
quiet in the city. I talked to one of the men in the factory 
about the strike. " It's all very well for the young men," one 
of them said ; " they are hot-headed and like striking ; but we 
have to starve for a month. That's what it means." Then 
we went to the school neighbouring the factory where the night 
class was held. There were two rooms — one for men, presided 
over by the schoolmaster ; and one for women, presided over 
by his wife. They had a lesson of two hours in reading, writing, 



LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 327 

and arithmetic. The men came to be taught in separate 
batches, one batch coming one week, one another. This 
day there were five men and two boys and six women. The 
men were reading a story about a bear — rather a tedious tale. 
" Yes, we are reading," one of them said to me, " and we 
understand some of it." That was, at any rate, consoling. 
They read to themselves first, then aloud in turn, standing up, 
and then they were asked to tell what they had read in their 
own words. They read haltingly, with difficulty grasping 
familiar words. They related fluently, except one man, who 
said he could remember nothing whatsoever about the doings 
of the bear. One little boy was doing with lightning rapidity 
those kinds of sums which, by giving you too many data and 
not enough — a superabundance of detail, leaving out the all 
that seems to be imperatively necessary — are to some minds 
peculiarly insoluble. The sum in question stated that a 
factory consisted of 770 hands — men, women, and children — 
and that the men received half as much again as the women, etc. 
That particular proportion of wages seems to exist in the 
arithmetic books of all countries, to the despair of the non- 
mathematical, and the little boy insisted on my following 
every step of his process of reckoning ; but not even he with 
the wisdom and sympathy of babes succeeded in teaching me 
how to do that kind of sum. He afterwards wrote in a copy- 
book pages of declensions of Russian nouns and adjectives. 
Here I found I could help him, and I saved him some trouble 
by dictating them to him ; though every now and then we had 
some slight doubt and discussion about the genitive plural. 
In the women's class, one girl explained to us, with tears in 
her eyes, how difficult it was for her to attend this class. Her 
fellow-workers laughed at her for it, and at home they told 
her that a woman's place was to be at work and not to meddle 
with books. Those who attended this school showed that they 
were really anxious to learn, as the effort and self-sacrifice 
needed were great. 

We stayed till the end of the lesson, and then we went home, 
where an excellent supper of eggs, etc., was awaiting us. We 
found the two old maids and their first cousin, who told us she 
was about to go to law for a legacy of 100,000 roubles which had 
been left her, but which was disputed by a more distant relation 
on the mother's side. We talked of lawsuits and politics and 



328 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

miracles, and real and false faith-healers, till bedtime came. 
A bed was made for me alongside of the stove. Made is the 
right word, for it was literally built up before my eyes. A 
sleeping-place was also made for the coachman on the floor of 
the small ante-room ; then the rest of the company disappeared 
to sleep. I say disappeared, because I literally do not know 
where in this small interior there was room for them to sleep. 
They consisted of the two old maids, their niece and her little 
girl, aged three, and another little girl, aged seven. Marie 
Karlovna slept in the room, but the rest disappeared, I suppose 
on the top of the stove, only it seemed to reach the ceiling ; 
somewhere they were, for the little girl, excited by the events 
of the day, sang snatches of song till a late hour in the night. 
The next morning, after I got up, the room was transformed 
from a bedroom into a dining-room and aired, breakfast was 
served, and at ten we started back again in the snow to 
Moscow. 

On the 23rd we arrived in the town at one o'clock. The 
streets of the suburbs seemed to be unusually still. Marie 
Karlovna said to me : " How quiet the streets are, but it seems 
to me an uncanny, evil quietness." Marie Karlovna lived in 
the Lobkovsky Pereulok, and I had the day before sent my 
things from the hotel to an apartment in the adjoining street, 
the Mwilnikov. When we arrived at the entrance of these 
streets, we found them blocked by a crowd and guarded by 
police and dragoons. We got through the other end of the 
street, and we were told that the night before Fiedler's School, 
which was a large building at the corner of these two streets, had 
been the scene of a revolutionary meeting ; that the revolution- 
aries had been surrounded in this house, had refused to surrender, 
had thrown a bomb at an officer and killed him, had been fired 
at by artillery, and had surrendered after killing 1 officer 
and 5 men, with 17 casualties — 15 wounded and 2 killed. 
All this had happened in my very street during my absence. 
An hour later we again heard a noise of guns, and an armed 
rising (some of the leaders of which, who were to have seized the 
Governor-General of the town and set up a provisional Govern- 
ment, had been arrested the night before in my street) had 
broken out in all parts of the town in spite of the arrests. A 
little later I saw a crowd of people on foot and in sledges flying 
in panic down the street shouting : " Kazaki ! " I heard and saw 



LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 329 

nothing else of any interest during the day. There were crowds 
of people in the streets till nightfall. 

On Sunday, Christmas Eve, I drove to the Hotel Dresden 
in the centre of Moscow to see Mamonov. The aspect of the 
town was extraordinary. The streets were full of people — 
flaneurs who were either walking about or gathered together in 
small or large groups at the street corners. Distant, and some- 
times quite near, sounds of firing were audible, and nobody seemed 
to care a scrap ; they were everywhere talking, discussing, and 
laughing. Imagine the difference between this and the scenes 
described in Paris during the street fighting in '32, '48, and '71. 

People went about their business just as usual. If there 
was a barricade they drove round it. The cabmen never dreamt 
of not going anywhere, although one of them said to me that 
it was most alarming. Moreover, an insuperable curiosity 
seemed to lead them to go and look where things were happen- 
ing. Several were killed in this way. On the other hand, at 
the slightest approach of troops they ran in panic like hares, 
although the troops did not do the passers-by any mischief. 
Two or three times I was walking in the streets when dragoons 
galloped past , and came to no harm. We heard shots all the time, 
and met the same groups of people and passed two barricades. 
The barricades were mostly not like those of the Faubourg 
St. Antoine, but small impediments made of branches and an 
overturned sledge ; they were put there to annoy and wear out 
the troops and not to stand siege. The revolutionaries adopted 
a guerilla street warfare. They fired or threw bombs and 
rapidly dispersed ; they made some attempts to seize the 
Nikolayev Railway Station, but in all cases they were repulsed. 
The attitude of the man in the street was curious ; sometimes 
he was indignant, with the strikers, sometimes indignant with 
the Government. If you asked a person of revolutionary 
sympathies he told you that sympathy was entirely with the 
revolution ; if you asked a person of moderate principles, he told 
you that the " people " were indignant with the strikers ; but 
the attitude of the average man in the street seemed to me one 
A sceptical indifference in spite of all — in spite of trade ceasing, 
houses being fired at, and the hospitals being full to overflowing 
of dead and wounded. The fact was that disorders had lost their 
first power of creating an impression ; they had become an 
everyday occurrence. 



330 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Here are various remarks I heard. One man, a commis- 
sionaire, asked whether I thought it was right to fire on the 
revolutionaries. I hesitated, gathering my thoughts to explain 
that I thought that they thoroughly deserved it since they 
began it, but that the Government nevertheless had brought 
it about by their dilatoriness. (This is exactly what I thought.) 
Misunderstanding my hesitation, he said : " Surely you, a 
foreigner, need not mind saying what you think, and you know 
it is wrong." (This was curious, because these people — 
commissionaires, porters, etc. — were often reactionary.) A 
cabman said to me : " Who do you think will get the best of 
it ? " I said : " I don't know ; what do you think ? " " Nothing 
will come of it," he said. " There will still be rich people like 
you and poor people like me ; and whether the Government 
is in the hands of the chinovniks or the students is all one and 
the same." Another man, a porter, an ex-soldier, said it was 
awful. You couldn't go anywhere or drive anywhere without 
risking being killed. Soldiers came back from the war and 
were killed in the streets. A bullet came, and then the man was 
done for. Another man, a kind of railway employee, said that 
the Russians had no stamina ; that the Poles would never give 
in, but the Russians would directly. Mamonov, who was fond 
of paradox, said to me that he hoped all the fanatics would 
be shot, and that then the Government would be upset. A 
policeman was guarding the street which led to the hotel. I 
asked if I could pass. " How could I not let a Barine with 
whom I am acquainted pass ? " he said. Then a baker's boy 
came up with a tray of rolls on his head, also asking to pass — 
to go to the hotel. After some discussion the policeman let 
him go, but suddenly said : " Or are you a rascal ? " Then I 
asked him what he thought of it all. He said : " We fire as little 
as possible. They are fools." The wealthier and educated 
classes were either intensely sympathetic or violently indignant 
with the revolutionaries ; the lower classes were sceptically 
resigned or indifferent — " Things are bad ; nothing will come 
of it for us." 

At midnight the windows of our house had been shaken by 
the firing of guns somewhere near ; but on Christmas morning 
(not the Russian Christmas) one could get about. I drove 
down one of the principal streets, the Kuznetski Most, into 
another large street, the Neglinii Proiesd (as if it were down 



LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 331 

Bond Street into Piccadilly), when suddenly in a flash all the 
cabs began to drive fast up the street. My cabman went on. 
He was inquisitive. We saw nothing. He shouted to another 
cabman, asking him what was the matter. No answer. We 
went a little farther down, when along the Neglinii Proiesd we 
saw a patrol and guns advancing. " Go back," shouted one of 
the soldiers, waving his rifle — and away we went. Later, I 
believe there was firing there. Farther along we met more 
patrols and ambulances. The shops were not only shut but 
boarded up. 

Next day I walked to the Nikolayev Station in the afternoon. 
It was from there that the trains went to St. Petersburg. The 
trains were running then, but how the passengers started I 
didn't know, for it was impossible to get near the station. Cabs 
were galloping away from it, and the square in front of it had 
been cleared by Cossacks. I think it was attacked that after- 
noon. I walked into the Riask Station, which was next door. 
It was a scene of desolation ; empty trains, stacked-up luggage, 
third-class passengers encamped in the waiting-room. There 
was a perpetual noise of firing. The town was under martial 
law. Nobody was allowed to be out of doors after nine 
o'clock under penalty of three months' imprisonment or a 3000 
roubles fine. Householders were made responsible for people 
firing out of their windows. 

On the morning of 27th December there was considerable 
movement and traffic in the streets ; the small shops and 
the tobacconists were open. Firing was still going on. They 
said a factory was being attacked. The troops who were sup- 
posed to be disaffected proved loyal. The one way to make 
them loyal was to throw bombs at them. The policemen were 
then armed with rifles and bayonets. A cabman said to me : 
" There is an illness abroad — we are sick ; it will pass — but God 
remains." I agreed with him. 



CHAPTER XVII 
RUSSIA : THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 

I SPENT all the winter of 1905-6 at Moscow with occa- 
sional visits to St. Petersburg and to the country. The 
strikes were over, but it was in a seething, restless 
state. Count Witte was Prime Minister. When he took office 
after making peace with the Japanese he was idolised as a 
hero, but he soon lost his popularity and his prestige. He satis- 
fied neither the revolutionaries nor the reactionaries, and he 
was neither King Log nor King Stork. Elections were held 
in the spring for the convening of the Duma, the first Russian 
Parliament, but they were not looked upon with confidence and 
they were boycotted by the more extreme parties. Russia 
was swarming with political parties, but of all these divisions 
and subdivisions, each with its programme and its watchword, 
there were only two which had any importance : the Con- 
stitutional Democrats called Kadets, 1 which represented the 
Intelligentsia, and the Labour Party, which represented the 
artisans and out of which the Bolsheviks were ultimately to 
grow. The peasants stood aloof, and remained separate. 

None of these parties produced either a statesman or remark- 
able man. There were any amount of clever men and fine 
orators in their ranks, but no man of action. 

A man of action did ultimately appear, but in the ranks of 
the Government — P. A. Stolypin — and he governed Russia for 
several years, till he was murdered. 

At Moscow I had two little rooms in the Mwilnikov pereulok 

on the ground floor. I was now a regular correspondent to the 

^Morning Post, and used to send them a letter once a week. 

iTheir St. Petersburg correspondent was Harold Monro, who 

wrote fiction under the pseudonym of " Saki." 

The stories that Monro wrote under the name of " Saki " in 
1 i.e. K.D.'s — constitution in Russian beginning with a " K." 

332 



THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 333 

the Westminster Gazette and the Morning Post attracted when they 
came out in these newspapers, and afterwards when they were 
republished, a considerable amount of attention ; but because 
they were witty, light, and ironical, and sometimes flippant, few 
people took " Saki " seriously as an artist. I venture to think 
he was an artist of a high order, and had his stories reached 
the public from Vienna or Paris, there would have been an 
artistic boom round his work of a deafening nature. 

As it is, people dismissed him as a funny writer. Funny he 
was, both in his books and in his conversation ; irresistibly 
witty and droll sometimes, sometimes ecstatically silly, so that 
he made you almost cry for laughter, but he was more than 
that — he was a thoughtful and powerful satirist, an astonishing 
observer of human nature, with the power of delineating the 
pathos and the irony underlying the relations of human beings 
in everyday life with exquisite delicacy and a strong sureness 
of touch. A good example of his wit is his answer when a lady 
asked him how his book could be got : " Not at an ironmonger's." 
His satire is seen at its strongest in the fantasy, When William 
Came, in which he describes England under German domina- 
tion, but the book in which his many gifts and his intuition 
for human things are mingled in the finest blend is perhaps 
The Unbearable Bassington, which is a masterpiece of character- 
drawing, irony, and pathos. And yet in literary circles in 
London, or at dinner-parties where you would hear people rave 
over some turgid piece of fiction, that because it was sordid was 
thought to be profound, and would probably be forgotten in 
a year's time, you would never have heard " Saki " mentioned 
as an artist to be taken seriously. 

" No one will buy," as the seller of gold-fish remarked at 
the fair — " no one will buy the little gold-fish, for men do not 
recognise the gifts of Heaven, the magical gifts, when they 
meet them." 

Nobody sought the suffrages of the literary and artistic 
circle less than " Saki." I think he would have been pleased 
with genuine serious recognition, as every artist would be, 
but the false reclame and the chatter of coteries bored him to 
extinction. 

In 1914 he showed what he was really made of by enlisting 
in the army, and he was killed in the war as a corporal after he 
had several times refused a commission. 



334 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

I spent Easter in Moscow, and this was one of the most 
impressive experiences I ever had. 

I have spent Easter in various cities — in Rome, Florence, 
Athens, and Hildesheim — and although in each of these places 
the feast has its own peculiar aspect, yet by far the most impres- 
sive and the most interesting celebration of the Easter festival 
I have ever witnessed was that of Moscow. This is not to be 
wondered at, for Easter is the most important feast of the year 
in Russia, the season of festivity and holiday-making in a 
greater degree than Christmas or New Year's Day. Secondly, 
Easter, which is kept with equal solemnity all over Russia, 
was especially interesting in Moscow, because Moscow is the 
stronghold of old traditions and the city of churches. Even 
more than Cologne, it is 

" Die Stadt die viele hundert 
Kapellen und Kirchen hat." 

There is a church almost in every street, and the Kremlin is a 
citadel of cathedrals. During Holy Week, towards the end of 
which the evidences of the fasting season grow more and more 
obvious by the closing of restaurants and the impossibility of 
buying any wine and spirits, there were, of course, services 
every day. During the first three days of Holy Week there 
was a curious ceremony to be seen in the Kremlin, which was 
held every two years. This was the preparation of the chrism 
or holy oil. While it was slowly stirred and churned in great 
cauldrons, filling the room with hot fragrance, a deacon read 
the Gospel without ceasing (he was relieved at intervals by 
others), and this lasted day and night for three days. On 
Maundy Thursday the chrism was removed in silver vessels to 
the Cathedral. The supply had to last the whole of Russia 
for two years. I went to the morning service in the Cathedral 
of the Assumption on Maundy Thursday. The church was 
crowded to suffocation. Everybody stood up, as there was no 
room to kneel. The church was lit with countless small wax 
tapers. The priests were clothed in white and silver. The 
singing of the noble plain chant without any accompaniment 
ebbed and flowed in perfect discipline ; the bass voices were 
unequalled in the world. Every class of the population was 
represented in the church. There were no seats, no pews, 
no precedence nor privilege. There was a smell of incense and 



THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 335 

a still stronger smell of poor people, without which, someone 
said, a church is not a church. On Good Friday there was the 
service of the Holy Shroud, and besides this a later service in 
which the Gospel was read out in fourteen different languages, 
and finally a service beginning at one o'clock in the morning 
and ending at four, to commemorate the Burial of Our Lord. 
How the priests endured the strain of these many and exceed- 
ingly long services was a thing to be wondered at ; for the fast, 
which was kept strictly during all this period, precluded butter, 
eggs, and milk, in addition to all the more solid forms of nourish- 
ment, and the services were about six times as long as those of 
the Catholic or other churches. 

The most solemn service of the year took place at midnight 
on Saturday in Easter week. From eight until ten o'clock 
the town, which during the day had been crowded with people 
buying provisions and presents and Easter eggs, seemed to be 
asleep and dead. At about ten people began to stream towards 
the Kremlin. At eleven o'clock there was already a dense 
crowd, many of the people holding lighted tapers, waiting 
outside in the square, between the Cathedral of the Assumption 
and that of Ivan Veliki. A little before twelve the cathedrals 
and palaces on the Kremlin were all lighted up with ribbons of 
various coloured lights. Twelve o'clock struck, and then the 
bell of Ivan Veliki began to boom : a beautiful, full-voiced, 
immense volume of sound— a sound which Clara Schumann said 
was the most beautiful she had ever heard. It was answered 
by other bells, and a little later all the bells of all the 
churches in Moscow were ringing together. Then from the 
Cathedral came the procession : first, the singers in crimson 
and gold ; the bearers of the gilt banners ; the Metropolitan, 
also in stiff vestments of crimson and gold ; and after him the 
officials in their uniforms. They walked round the Cathedral 
to look for the Body of Our Lord, and returned to the Cathedral 
to tell the news that He was risen. The guns went off, rockets 
were fired, and illuminations were seen across the river, light- 
ing up the distant cupola of the great Church of the Saviour 
with a cloud of fire. 

The crowd began to disperse and to pour into the various 
churches. I went to the Manege — an enormous riding school, 
in which the Ekaterinoslav Regiment had its church. Half the 
building looked like a fair. Long tables, twinkling with hun- 



336 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

dreds of wax tapers, were loaded with the three articles of food 
which were eaten at Easter — a huge cake called kulich ; a kind 
of sweet cream made of curds and eggs, cream and sugar, called 
Paskha (Easter) ; and Easter eggs, dipped and dyed in many 
colours. They were waiting to be blessed. The church itself 
was a tiny little recess on one side of the building. There the 
priests were officiating, and down below in the centre of the 
building the whole regiment was drawn up. There were two 
services — a service which began at midnight and lasted about 
half an hour ; and Mass, which followed immediately after it, 
lasting till about three in the morning. At the end of the first 
service, when the words, " Christ is risen," were sung, the 
priest kissed the deacon three times, and then the members of 
the congregation kissed each other, one person saying, " Christ 
is risen," and the other answering, " He is risen, indeed." The 
colonel kissed the sergeant ; the sergeant kissed all the men 
one after another. While this ceremony was proceeding, I 
left and went to the Church of the Saviour, where the first 
service was not yet over. Here the crowd was so dense that 
it was almost impossible to get into the church, although it 
was immense. The singing in this church was ineffable. I 
waited until the end of the first service, and then I was borne 
by the crowd to one of the narrow entrances and hurled through 
the doorway outside. The crowd was not rough ; they were 
not jostling one another, but with cheerful carelessness people 
dived into it as you dive into a scrimmage at football, and 
propelled the unresisting herd towards the entrance, the result 
being, of course, that a mass of people got wedged into the 
doorway, and the process of getting out took longer than it 
need have done ; and had there been a panic, nothing could 
have prevented people being crushed to death. After this I 
went to a friend's house to break the fast and eat kulich, Paskha, 
and Easter eggs, and finally returned home when the dawn 
was faintly shining on the dark waters of the Moscow River, 
whence the ice had only lately disappeared. 

In the morning people came to bring me Easter greetings, 
and to give me Easter eggs, and to receive gifts. I was writing 
in my sitting-room and I heard a faint mutter in the next room, 
a small voice murmuring, Gospodi, Gospodi (" Lord, Lord "). 
I went to see who it was, and found it was the policeman, sighing 
for his tip, not wishing to disturb, but at the same time anxious 



THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 337 

to indicate his presence. He brought me a crimson egg. Then 
came the doorkeeper and the cook. The policeman must, 
I think, have been pleased with his tip, because policemen kept 
on coming all the morning, and there were not more than two 
who belonged to my street. 

In the afternoon I went to a hospital for wounded soldiers 
to see them keep Easter, which they did by playing blind man's 
buff to the sound of a flute played by one poor man who was 
crippled for life. One of the soldiers gave me as an Easter gift 
a poem, a curious human document. It is in two parts called 
" Past and Present." This one is " Present " : 

" PRESENT " 

" I lived the quarter of a century 
Without knowing happy days ; 
My life went quickly as a cart 
Drawn by swift horses. 
I never knew the tenderness of parents 
Which God gives to all ; 
For fifteen years I lived in a shop 
Busied in heaping up riches for a rich man. 
I was in my twentieth year 
When I was taken as a recruit ; 
I thought that the end had come 
To my sorrowful sufferings, 
But no ! and here misfortune awaited me ; 
I was destined to serve in that country, 
Where I had to fight like a lion with the foe, 
For the honour of Russia, for my dear country. 
I shall for a long time not forget 
That hour, and that date of the 17th, 1 
In which by the river Liao-he 
I remained for ever without my legs. 
Now I live contented with all, 
Where good food and drink are given, 
But I would rather be a free bird 
And see the dear home where I was born." 

This is the sequel : 

" PAST " 

" I will tell you, brothers, 
How I spent my youth ; 
I heaped up silver, 
I did not know the sight of copper ; 

1 17th August, battle of Liaoyang. 



338 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

I was merry, young, and nice ; 

I loved lovely maidens ; 

I lived in clover, lived in freedom 

Like a young ' barin.' 

I slept on straw. 

Just like a little pig. 

I had a very big house 

Where I could rest. 

It was a mouldy barn, 

There where the women beat the flax. 

Every day I bathed 

In spring water ; 

I used for a towel 

My scanty leg-cloth. 

In the beer-shops, too, 

I used to like to go, 

To show how proudly 

I knew how to drink ' vodka.' 

Now at the age of twenty-six 

This liberty no longer is for me. 

I remember my mouldy roof, 

And I shed a bitter tear. 

When I lived at home I was contented, 

I experienced no bitterness in service. 

I have learnt to know something, 

Fate has brought me to Moscow ; 

I live in a house in fright and grief, 

Every day and every hour ; 

And when I think of liberty, 

I cannot see for tears. 

That is how I lived from my youth ; 

That is what freedom means. 

I drank ' vodka ' in freedom, 

Afterwards I have only to weep. 

Such am I, young Vaniousia, 

This fellow whom you now see 

Was once a splendid merry-maker, 

Named Romodin." 

These two poems, seemingly so contradictory, were the 
sincere expression of the situation of the man, who was a 
cripple in the hospital. He gave both sides of each situation — 
that of freedom and that of living in a hospital. 

On Saturday afternoon I went to one of the permanent 
fairs or markets in the town, where there were many booths. 
Everything was sold here, and here the people bought their 
clothes. They were then buying their summer yachting caps. 
One man offered me a stolen gold watch for a small sum. 



THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 339 

Another begged me to buy him a pair of cheap boots. I did 
so ; upon which he said : " Now that you have made half a 
man of me, make a whole man of me by buying me a jacket." 
I refused, however, to make a whole man of him. 

On Easter Monday I went out to luncheon with some friends 
in the Intelligentsia. We were a large party, and one of 
the guests was an officer who had been to the war. Towards 
the end of luncheon, when everybody was convivial, healths 
were drunk, and one young man, who proclaimed loudly 
that he was a Social Revolutionary, drank to the health of 
the Republic. I made great friends with the Social Revolu- 
tionary during luncheon. When this health was drunk, I 
was alarmed as to what the officer might do. But the officer 
turned out to be this man's brother. The officer himself made 
a speech which was, I think, the most brilliant example of 
compromise I have ever heard ; for he expressed his full 
sympathy with the Liberal movement in Russia, including its 
representatives in the extreme parties, and at the same time 
his unalterable loyalty to his Sovereign. 

After luncheon, the Social Revolutionary, who had sworn 
me eternal friendship, was told that I had relations in London 
who managed a bank. So he came up to me and said : " If 
you give our Government one penny in the way of a loan I shall 
shoot you dead." 

After that we danced for the rest of the afternoon. The 
Social Revolutionary every now and then inveighed against 
loans and expressed his hope that the Government would be 
bankrupt. 

In May I went to St. Petersburg for the opening of the Duma, 
and I stayed there till the Duma was dissolved in July. 

The brief life of the first Duma was an extraordinarily 
interesting spectacle to watch. The Duma met in the beautiful 
Taurid palace that Catherine the Second built for Potemkin. In 
the lobby, which was a large Louis xv. ballroom, members and 
visitors used to flock in crowds, smoke cigarettes, and throw 
away the ashes and the ends on to the parquet floor. There 
were peasant members in their long black coats, some of them 
wearing crosses and medals ; Popes, Tartars, Poles, men in 
every kind of dress except uniform. 

There was an air of intimacy, ease, and familiarity about 
the whole proceedings. The speeches were eloquent, but no 



340 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

signs of political experience or statesmanlike action were to be 
discerned. 

I got to know a great many of the members : Aladin, who 
was looked upon as a violent firebrand, and the star of the Left ; 
Milioukov, the leader of the Kadets, who was well known as a 
journalist and a professor ; Kovolievsky, also a well-known 
writer and professor, a large, genial, comfortable man with an 
embracing manner and a great warmth of welcome, and a rich, 
flowing vocabulary. 

The peasants liked him and he was the only politician 
whom they trusted. They sent him a deputation to inform him 
that whenever he stood up to vote they intended to stand up 
in a body, and whenever he remained seated they would remain 
seated too. I also knew many peasant members. 

The proceedings of the Duma resulted in a deadlock between 
it and the Government from the very first moment it met. 
It soon became obvious that the Government must either 
dissolve the Duma or form a Ministry taken from the Duma, 
that is to say, from the opposition. The question was, if they 
did not wish to do that, would the country stand a dissolution 
or would there be a revolution ? The crucial question of the 
hour was, should the Government appoint a Kadet Ministry, 
consisting of Liberals belonging to the Constitutional Demo- 
cratic party who formed the great majority of the Duma, or 
should they dissolve the Duma ? There was no third course 
possible. I thought at the time that events would move more 
quickly than they did. I thought if the Duma were dissolved, 
not only disorder but immediate, open, and universal revolution 
would follow. 

The army was shaky. Non-commissioned officers of the 
Guards regiments were in touch with the Labour members of 
the Duma, and their conversations, at which I sometimes 
assisted, were not reassuring. My impression from these con- 
versations and from all the talks I had with the peasants and 
Labour members was that revolution, if and when it did come, 
would be a terrible thing, and I thought it might quite likely 
come at once. Mutinies had occurred in more than sixty regi- 
ments ; a regiment of Guards, the Emperor's own regiment, 
had revolted in St. Petersburg. I thought the dissolution 
would be the signal for an immediate outbreak of some kind. 
I knew nothing decisive could happen till the army turned. I 



THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 341 

thought the army might turn, or turn sufficiently to give the 
Liberal leaders the upper hand. I was mistaken. 

At the end of July 1906 the Government was vacillating ; 
they were on the verge of capitulation, and within an ace of 
forming a Kadet Ministry. I think they were only prevented 1 
from doing so by the appearance on the scene of P. A. Stolypin. 
As soon as Stolypin made his first speech in the Duma, two 
things were clear : he was not afraid of opposition ; he was 
determined not to give in. He was going to fight the Duma ; 
and if necessary he would not shrink from dissolving it, and risk- 
ing the consequences. At the end of July, I Stolypin strongly 
urged dissolution. He argued that if the Kadets came into 
power they would not remain in office a week, but would be at 
the mercy of the Extremists, and at once replaced by the 
Extreme Left, and swept away by an inrush of unripe and in- 
experienced Social Democrats who hated the Liberals more 
bitterly than they hated the Government. There would then, 
he thought, be no possibility of building a dam or barrier against 
the tide of revolution, and the country would be plunged in 
anarchy. Judging from what occurred in 19x7, Stolypin 's fore- 
cast was correct. For this is precisely what happened then. 
The Liberals were at once turned out of office, and replaced 
first by Kerensky and then by Lenin. The pendulum swung 
as far to the left as it could go, and this is just what Stolypin 
anticipated and feared in 1906. 

But many people in responsible positions (including General 
Trepov) were advocating the formation of a Kadet Ministry ; 
and had the Kadets had any leaders of character, experience, 
and strength of purpose, the counsel would perhaps have been 
a sound one. 

At the time I thought the only means of avoiding a civil 
war would be to create and support a strong Liberal Ministry. 
The objection to this was, there was no such thing available. 
What happened was that Stolypin 's advice was listened to. 
The Duma was dissolved and no revolution followed. The 
army did not turn ; the moderate Liberals capitulated without 
a fight. They took the dissolution lying down ; all they did 
was to go to Finland and sign a protest, which had no effect 
on the situation. It merely gave the Government a pretext for 
disenfranchising certain of their leading members. 

It may seem strange that the Duma, which was composed 



342 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

of the flower of intellectual Russia, and certainly had a large 
section of public opinion behind it, as well as prestige at home 
and abroad, should have capitulated so tamely. 

The truth was that neither in the ranks of the moderate 
Liberals, nor in those of the Extremists, although they were 
in some cases men of exceptional talents, was there one man 
sufficiently strong to be a leader. The man of strong character 
was on the other side. He was Stolypin ; and no one on the 
side of the Liberals was a match for him. The Liberals were 
journalists, men of letters, professors, and able lawyers, but 
there was not one man of action in their ranks. 

As soon as the Duma was dissolved and no open revolution 
came about, I did not think there would be another act in the 
revolutionary drama for another ten years. I put this on public 
record at the time, and as it turned out, I was only a year out, 
as the revolution took place eleven years after the dissolution 
of the first Duma. 

All through those summer months I saw many interesting 
sights, and made many interesting acquaintances. 

One Sunday I spent the afternoon at Peterhof , a suburb of 
St. Petersburg, where the Emperor used to live. There in the 
park, amidst the trees, the plashing waterfalls, and the tall 
fountains, " les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres," 
the lilac bushes, and the song of many nightingales, the middle 
classes were enjoying their Sunday afternoon and the music 
of a band. Suddenly, in this beautiful and not inappropriate 
setting, the Empress of Russia passed in an open carriage, 
without any escort, looking as beautiful as a flower. I could 
not help thinking of Marie Antoinette at the Trianon, and I 
wondered whether ten thousand swords would leap from 
their scabbards on her behalf. 

The most interesting of my acquaintances in the Duma 
was Nazarenko, the peasant deputy for Karkoff. Professor 
Kovolievsky introduced me to him. Nazarenko was far the 
most remarkable of the peasant deputies. He was a tall, 
striking figure, with black hair, a pale face, with prominent 
clearly cut features, such as Velasquez would have taken to 
paint a militant apostle. He had been through a course of 
primary education, and by subsequently educating himself 
he had assimilated a certain amount of culture. Besides this, 
he was an eloquent speaker, and a most original character. 



THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 343 

" I want to go to London," he said, " so that the English 
may see a real peasant and not a sham one, and so that I can 
tell the English what we, the real people, think and feel about 
them." I said I was glad he was going. " I shan't go unless 
I am chosen by the others," he answered. " I have written 
my name down and asked, but I shan't ask twice. I never ask 
twice for anything. When I say my prayers I only ask God 
once for a thing ; and if it is not granted, I never ask again. 
And so it's not likely I would ask my fellow-men twice for any- 
thing. I am like that ; I leave out that passage in the prayers 
about being a miserable slave. I am not a miserable slave, 
neither of man nor of Heaven." " That is what the Church 
calls spiritual pride," I answered. " I don't believe in all that," 
he answered. " My religion is the same as that of Tolstoy." 
He then pointed to the ikon which is in the lobby of the Duma. 
" I pay no attention to that," he said. " It is a board covered 
with gilt ; but a lot of people think that the ikon is God." 

I asked him if he liked Tolstoy's books. " Yes," he an- 
swered. " His books are great, but his philosophy is weak. 
It may be all right for mankind thousands of years hence, but 
it is of no use now. I have no friends," he continued. "Books 
are my friends. But lately my house was burnt, and all my 
books with it. I have read a lot, but I never had anybody to 
tell me what to read, so I read without any system. I did not 
go to school till I was thirteen." 

" Do you like Dostoievsky's books ? " " Yes ; he knows 
all about the human soul. When I see a man going downhill, 
I know exactly how it will happen, and what he is going through, 
and I could stop him because I have read Dostoievsky." " Have 
you read translations of any foreign books ? " " Very few ; 
some of Zola's books, but I don't like them, because he does not 
really know the life he is describing. Some of Guy de Mau- 
passant's stories I have read, but I do not like them either 
because I don't want to know more about that kind of people 
than I know already." " Have you read Shakespeare ? " 
" Yes. There is nobody like him. When you read a conversa- 
tion of Shakespeare's, when one person is speaking you think 
he is right, and when the next person answers him you think 
he is right. He understands everybody. But I want to read 
Spencer— Herbert Spencer. I have never been able to get his 
works." I promised to procure him Herbert Spencer's works. 



344 TH E PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

One evening I went to see Nazarenko in his house. He was 
not at home, but a friend of his was there. He told me to wait. 
He was a peasant ; thirty-nine years old, rather bald, with a nice 
intelligent face. At first he took no notice of me, and read 
aloud to himself out of a book. Then he suddenly turned to me 
and asked me who I was. I said I was an English correspondent. 
He got up, shut the door, and begged me to stay. " Do the 
English know the condition of the Russian peasantry ? " he 
asked. " They think we are wolves and bears. Do I look like 
a wolf ? Please say I am not a wolf." Then he ordered some 
tea, and got a bottle of beer. He asked me to tell him how 
labourers lived in England, what their houses were made 
of, what wages a labourer received, what was the price of 
meat, whether they ate meat ? Then he suddenly, to my 
intense astonishment, put the following question to me : " In 
England do they think that Jesus Christ was a God or only 
a great man? " I asked him what he thought. He said he 
thought He was a great man. He said that the Russian 
people were religious and superstitious ; they were deceived by 
the priests, who threatened them with damnation. He asked 
me if I could lend him an English Bible. He wanted to see 
if it was the same as a Russian Bible. I said it was exactly 
the same. He was immensely astonished. " Do you mean to 
say," he asked, " that there are all those stories about Jonah 
and the whale, and Joshua and the moon ? " I said " Yes." 
" I thought," he said, " those had been put in for us." I tried 
to explain to him that Englishmen were taught almost exactly 
the same thing, and that the Anglican and the Orthodox Church 

' used the same Bible. We then talked of ghosts. He asked 
me if I believed in ghosts. I said I did. He asked why. I 
gave various reasons. He said he could believe in a kind of 

" telepathy, a kind of moral wireless telegraphy ; but ghosts were 
the invention of old women. He suddenly asked me whether 
the earth was four thousand years old. " Of course it's older," 
he said. " But that's what we are taught. We are taught 
nothing about geography and geology. It is, of course, a fact 
that there is no such thing as God," he said ; " because, if there 
is a God, He must be a just God ; and as there is so much in- 
justice in the world, it is plain that a just God does not exist. 
But you," he went on, " an Englishman who has never been 
deceived by officials, do you believe that God exists ? " (He 



THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 345 

thought that all ideas of religion and God as taught to the 
Russian people were part of a great official lie.) " I do," I 
said. " Why ? " he asked. I asked him if he had read the 
Book of Job. He said he had. I said that when Job has 
everything taken away from him, although he has done no 
wrong, suddenly, in the last depth of his misery, he recognises 
the existence of God in the immensity of nature, and feels that 
his own soul is a part of a plan too vast for him to conceive 
or to comprehend. In feeling that he is part of the scheme, he 
acknowledges the existence of God, and that is enough ; he 
is able to consent, and to console himself, although in dust 
and ashes. That was, I said, what I thought one could feel. 
He admitted the point of view, but he did not share it. After 
we had had tea we went for a walk in some gardens not far off, 
where there were various theatrical performances going on. 
The audience amused me, it applauded so rapturously and in- 
sisted on an encore, whatever was played, and however it was 
played, with such thunderous insistence. " Priests," said my 
friend, " base everything on the devil. There is no devil. 
There was no fall of man. There are no ghosts, no spirits, but 
there are millions and millions of other inhabited worlds." 

I left him late, when the performance was over. This 
man, who was a member of the Duma for the government of 
Tula, was called Petrukin. I looked up his name in the list 
of members, and found he had been educated in the local church 
school of the village of Kologrivo ; that he had spent the whole 
of his life in this village, and had been engaged in agriculture ; 
that among the peasants he enjoyed great popularity as being 
a clever and hard-working man. He belonged to no party. 
He was not in the least like the men of peasant origin who had 
assimilated European culture. He was naturally sensible and 
alert of mind. 

One Sunday I went by train to a place called Terrioki, in 
Finland, where a meeting was to be held by the Labour Party 
of the Duma. The train was crowded with people who looked 
more like holiday-makers than political supporters of the 
Extreme Left — so crowded that one had to stand up on the 
platform outside the carriage throughout the journey. After 
a journey of an hour and a quarter we arrived at Terrioki. 
The crowd leapt from the train and immediately unfurled red 
flags and sang the " Marseillaise." The crowd occupied the 



346 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

second line, and a policeman observed that, as another train 
was coming in and would occupy that line, it would be advisable 
if they were to move on. " What ? — police even here in free 
Finland ? " somebody cried. " The police are elected here by 
the people," was the pacifying reply ; and the crowd moved 
on, formed into a procession six abreast, and started marching 
to the gardens where the meeting was to be held, singing the 
" Marseillaise " and other songs all the way. The dust was so 
thick that, after marching with the procession for some time, 
I took a cab and told the driver to take me to the meeting. 
We drove off at a brisk speed past innumerable wooden houses, 
villas, shops (where Finnish knives and English tobacco were 
sold), into a wood. After we had driven for twenty minutes I 
asked the driver if we still had far to go. He turned round and, 
smiling, said in pidgin-Russian (he was a Finn) : " Me not know 
where you want to go." Then we turned back, and, after a 
long search and much questioning of passers-by, found the 
garden, into which one was admitted by ticket. (Here, again, 
anyone could get in.) In a large grassy and green garden, 
shady with many trees, a kind of wooden semicircular proscenium 
had been erected, and in one part of it was a low platform not 
more spacious than a table. On the proscenium the red 
flags were hung. In front of the table there were a few 
benches, but the greater part of the public stood. The 
inhabitants of the villas were here in large numbers ; there 
were not many workmen, but a number of students and 
various other members of the Intelligentsia — young men with 
undisciplined hair and young ladies in large art nouveau hats 
and Reformkleider. M. Zhilkin, the leader of the Labour Party 
in the Duma, took the chair. 

The meeting was opened by a man who laid stress on the 
necessity of a Constituent Assembly. Speeches succeeded one 
another. Students climbed up into the pine trees and on 
the roof of the proscenium. Others lay on the grass behind 
the crowd. " Land and Liberty " was the burden of the 
speeches. There was nothing new or striking said. The 
hackneyed commonplaces were rolled out one after another. 
Indignation, threats, menaces, blood and thunder. And all 
the time the sun shone hotter and " all Nature looked smiling 
and gay." The audience applauded, but no fierceness of 
invective, no torrent of rhetoric, managed to make the meeting 



THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 347 

a serious one. Nature is stronger than speeches, and sunshine 
more potent than rant. It is true the audience were enjoying 
themselves ; but they were enjoying the outing, and the speeches 
were an agreeable incidental accompaniment. They enjoyed 
the attacks on the powers that be, as the Bank-holiday maker 
enjoys Aunt Sally at the seaside. Some Finns spoke in Russian 
and Finnish, and then Aladin made a speech. As he rose he 
met with an ovation. Aladin was of peasant extraction. He 
had been to the University in Russia, emigrated to London, 
had been a dock labourer, a printer's devil, a journalist, 
an electrical engineer, a teacher of Russian ; he spoke French 
and German perfectly, and English so well that he spoke Russian 
with a London accent. Aladin had a great contempt for the 
methods of the Russian revolutionaries. He said that only people 
without any stuff in them would demand a Constituent Assembly. 
" You don't demand a Constituent Assembly ; you constitute 
it," he said. " The Russian people would never be free until 
they showed by their acts that they meant to be free." Aladin 
spoke without any gesticulation. He was a dark, shortish man, 
with a small moustache and grey, serious eyes, short hair, and 
had a great command of mordant language. His oratory on 
this occasion was particularly nervous and pithy. But he 
did not succeed in turning that audience of holiday-makers 
into a revolutionary meeting. The inhabitants of the villas 
clapped. The young ladies in large hats chortled with delight. 
It was a glorious picnic — an ecstatic game of Aunt Sally. And 
when the interval came, the public rushed to the restaurants. 
There was one on the seashore, with a military band playing. 
There was a beach and a pier, and boats and bathers. Here 
was the true inwardness of the meeting. Many people remained 
on the beach for the rest of the afternoon. 

As soon as the Duma was dissolved I went to Moscow and 
stayed a few days at Marie Karlovna's datcha at Tsaritsina, 
near Moscow. 

Near the house where I was living there was a village ; as 
this village was close to the town of Moscow, I thought that its 
inhabitants would be suburban. This was not so. The near- 
ness to Moscow seemed to make no difference at all. I was 
walking through the village one morning, when a peasant who 
was sitting on his doorstep called me and asked me if I would 
like to eat an apple. I accepted his invitation. He said he 



348 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

presumed I was living with Marie Karlovna, as other English- 
men had lived there before. Then he asked abruptly : " Is 
Marie Alexandrovna in your place ? " I said my hostess's 
name was Marie Karlovna. " Of course," he said, " I don't 
mean here, but in your place, in your country." I didn't 
understand. Then he said it again louder, and asked if I 
was deaf. I said I wasn't deaf, and that I understood what 
he said, but I did not know whom he was alluding to. " Talk- 
ing to you," he said, " is like talking to a Tartar. You look at 
one and don't understand what one says." Then it suddenly 
flashed on me that he was alluding to the Duchess of Edinburgh. 1 
" You mean the relation of our Queen Alexandra ? " I said. 
" That's what I mean," he answered. " Your Queen is the 
sister of the Empress Marie Feodorovna." It afterwards 
appeared that he thought that England had been semi- 
Russianised owing to this relationship. 

Two more peasants joined us, and one of them brought a 
small bottle (the size of a sample) of vodka and a plate of 
cherries. " We will go and drink this in the orchard," they 
said. So we went to the orchard. " You have come here to 
learn," said the first peasant, a bearded man, whose name was 
Feodor. " Many Englishmen have been here to learn. I 
taught one all the words that we use." I said I was a corre- 
spondent ; that I had just arrived from St. Petersburg, where 
I had attended the sittings of the Duma. " What about the 
Duma ? " asked the other peasant. " They've sent it away. 
Will there be another one ? " I said a manifesto spoke of a 
new one. " Yes," said Feodor, " there is a manifesto abolish- 
ing punishments." I said I hadn't observed that clause. 
" Will they give us back our land ? " asked Feodor. " All 
the land here belongs to us really." Then followed a long 
explanation as to why the land belonged to them. It was 
Crown property. I said I did not know. " If they don't 
give it back to us we shall take it," he said simply. Then 
one of the other peasants added : " Those manifestos are not 
written by the Emperor, but by the ' authorities.' " (The 
same thing was said to me by a cabman at St. Petersburg, 
his reason being that the Emperor would say " I," whereas 
the manifesto said " We.") Then they asked me why they 

1 A palace and a park in the neighbourhood belonged to the Duchess 
of Edinburgh, whose name was Marie Alexandrovna. 



THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 349 

had not won the war, and whether it was true that the war 
had been badly managed. " We know nothing," he said. 
" What newspaper tells the truth ? Where can we find the 
real truth ? Is it to be found in the Russkoe Slovo ? " (a big 
Moscow newspaper). They asked me about the Baltic Fleet 
and why Admiral Nebogatov had made a signal which meant 
" Beat us." 

I went away, and as I was going Feodor asked me if I 
would like to go and see the haymaking the next day. If so, 
I had better be at his house at three o'clock in the afternoon. 
The next day, Sunday, I kept my appointment, but found 
nobody at home in the house of Feodor except a small child. 
" Is Feodor at home ? " I asked. A man appeared from a 
neighbouring cottage and said : " Feodor is in the inn, drunk." 
"Is he going to the haymaking?" I asked. "Of course, 
he's going." " Is he very drunk ? " I asked. " No, not 
very ; I will tell him you are here." And the man went to 
fetch him. Then a third person arrived — a young peasant 
in his Sunday clothes — and asked me where I was going. I 
said I was going to make hay. " Do you know how to ? " 
he asked. I said I didn't. " I see," he said, " you are just 
going to amuse yourself. I advise you not to go. They will 
be drunk, and there might be unpleasantness." 

Presently Feodor arrived, apparently perfectly sober except 
that he was rather red in the face. He harnessed his horse 
to a cart. " Would I mind not wearing my hat, but one of 
his ? " he asked. I said I didn't mind, and he lent me a dark 
blue yachting cap, which is what the peasants wear all over 
Russia. My shirt was all right. I had got on a loose Russian 
shirt without a collar. He explained that it would look odd 
to be seen with someone wearing such a hat as I had. It 
was a felt hat. The little boy who was running about the 
house was Feodor's son. He was barefooted, and one of his 
feet was bound up. I asked what was the matter with it. 
The bandage was at once taken off, and I was shown the 
remains of a large blister and gathering. " It's been cured 
now," Feodor said. " It was a huge blister. It was cured 
by witchcraft. I took him to the Wise Woman, and she put 
something on it and said a few words, and the pain stopped, 
and it got quite well. Doctors are no good ; they only cut 
one about. I was kicked by a horse and the pain was terrible. 



350 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

I drank a lot of vodka, and, it did no good ; then I went to the 
Wise Woman and she put ointment on the place and she 
spoke away the pain. We think it's best to be cured like this 
— village fashion." I knew this practice existed, but it was 
curious to find it so near Moscow. It was like finding witch- 
craft at Surbiton. 

We started for the hay meadows, which were about ten 
miles distant. On the road we met other peasants in carts 
bound for the same destination. They all gravely took off 
their hats to each other. After an hour and a half's drive 
we arrived at the Moscow River, on the bank of which there 
is a tea-shop. Tea-shops exist all over Russia. The feature 
of them is, that you cannot buy spirits there. We stopped 
and had tea. Everybody was brought a small teapot for 
tea and a huge teapot of boiling water, and some small cups, 
and everybody drank about four or five cups out of the saucer. 
They eat the sugar separately, and do not put it into the cup. 

We crossed the river on a floating bridge, and, driving past 
a large white Byzantine monastery, arrived at the green hay 
meadows on the farther river-bank towards sunset. The hay- 
making began. The first step which was taken was for vodka 
bottles to be produced and for everybody to drink vodka 
out of a cup. There was a great deal of shouting and an 
immense amount of abuse. " It doesn't mean anything," 
Feodor said. " We curse each other and make it up after- 
wards." They then drew lots for the particular strip they 
should mow, each man carrying his scythe high over his 
shoulder. (" Don't come too near," said Feodor ; " when 
men have ' drink taken ' they are careless with scythes.") 

When the lots were drawn they began mowing. It was a 
beautiful sight to see the mowing in the sunset by the river ; 
the meadows were of an intense soft green ; the sky fleecy 
and golden to the west, and black with a great thundercloud 
over the woods to the east, lit up with intermittent summer 
lightning. The mowers were dressed in different coloured shirts 
— scarlet, blue, white, and green. They mowed till the twilight 
fell and the thundercloud drew near to us. Then Feodor 
came and made our cart into a tent by tying up the shafts, 
putting a piece of matting across them, and covering it with 
hay, and under this he made beds of hay. We had supper. 
Feodor said his prayers, and prepared to go to sleep, but 



THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 351 

changed his mind, got up, and joined some friends in a neigh- 
bouring cart. 

Three children and a deaf-and-dumb peasant remained 
with me. The peasants who were in the neighbouring tent 
were drunk. They began by quarrelling ; then they sang for 
about four hours without stopping ; then they talked. Feodor 
came back about half an hour before it was light, and slept 
for that brief space. I did not sleep at all. I wasn't tired, 
and the singing was delightful to hear : so extremely character- 
istic of Russia and so utterly unlike the music of any other 
country, except Mongolia. The children chattered for some 
time about mushroom gathering, and the deaf-and-dumb man 
told me a lot by signs, and then everybody went to sleep. 

As soon as it was light the mowers all got up and began 
mowing. I do not know which was the more beautiful effect — 
that of the dusk or of the dawn. The dawn was grey with 
pearly clouds and suffused with the faintest pink tinge, and 
in the east the sun rose like a red ball, with no clouds near it. 
At ten o'clock we drove to an inn and had tea ; we then drove 
back, and the hay, although it was quite wet, for it had 
rained in the night, was carried there and then. " The women 
dry it at home," Feodor explained ; "it's too far for us to 
come here twice." The carts were laden with hay, and I drove 
one of them home, lying on the top of the hay, in my sleep. 
I had always envied the drivers of carts whom one meets 
lying on a high load of hay, fast asleep, and now I know from 
experience that there is no such delicious slumber, with the 
kind sun warming one through and through after a cold night, 
and the slow jolting of the wagon rocking one, and the smell 
of the hay acting like a soporific. Every nowjand then I 
awoke to see the world through a golden haze, and then one 
fell back and drowsed with pleasure in a deep slumber of an 
inexpressibly delicious quality. 

When we recrossed the river we again stopped for tea. As 
we were standing outside an old woman passed us, and just 
as she passed, one of the peasants said to me : "Sit down, Bavin." 
Bavin means a monsieur, in contradistinction to the lower class. 
" Very like a Barin," said the woman, with a sarcastic snort, 
upon which the peasant told her in the plainest and most un- 
complimentary speech I have ever heard exactly what he thought 
of her personal appearance, her antecedents, and what she was 



352 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

fit for. She passed on with dignity and in silence. After 
a time, I climbed up on the wagon again, and sank back into 
my green paradise of dreams, and remembered nothing more 
till we arrived home at five o'clock in the evening. 

A few days later I travelled from Moscow to St. Petersburg 
by a slow train in a third-class carriage. In the carriage there 
was a mixed and representative assembly of people : a priest, 
a merchant from Kursk, a photographer from Tchelabinsk, a 
young volunteer — that is to say, a young man doing his year's 
military service previous to becoming an officer — two minor 
public servants, an ex-soldier who had been through the Turkish 
campaign, a soldier who had lately returned from Manchuria, 
three peasants, two Tartars, a tradesman, a carpenter, and 
some others. Besides these, a band of gipsies (with their 
children) encamped themselves on the platform outside the 
carriage, and penetrated every now and then into the carriage 
until they were driven out by threats and curses. 

The first thing everybody did was to make themselves 
thoroughly comfortable — to arrange mattresses and pillows 
for the night ; then they began to make each other's acquaint- 
ance. We had not travelled far before the gipsies began to 
sing on the platform, and this created some interest. They 
suggested fortune-telling, but the ex-soldier shouted at them 
in a gruff voice to begone. One of the officials had his fortune 
told. The gipsy said she could do it much better for five roubles 
(ten shillings) than for a few kopecks which he had given. I 
had my fortune told, which consisted in a hurried rigmarole 
to the effect that I was often blamed, but never blamed others ; 
that I could only work if I was my own master, and that I 
would shortly experience a great change of fortune. The 
gipsy added that if I could give her five roubles she would tie 
a piece of bark in my handkerchief which, with the addition of 
a little bread and salt, would render me immune from danger. 
The gipsies soon got out. The journey went on uneventfully. 

" Le moine disait son breviaire, 
. . . Une femme chantait," 

as in La Fontaine's fable. We had supper and tea, and the 
ex-soldier related the experiences of his life, saying he had 
travelled much and seen the world (he was a Cossack by birth) 
and was not merely a Muzhik. This offended one of the 



THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 353 

peasants, a bearded man, who walked up from his place and 
grunted in protest, and then walked back again. 

They began to talk politics. The Cossack was asked his 
opinion on the attitude of the Cossacks. He said their attitude 
had changed, and that they objected to police service. The 
photographer from Tchelabinsk corroborated this statement, 
saying he had been present at a Cossack meeting in Siberia. 
Then we had a short concert. The photographer produced a 
mandoline and played tunes. All the inmates of the carriage 
gathered round him. One of the peasants said: "Although 
I am an ignorant man " (it was the peasant who had grunted) 
" I could see at once that he wasn't simply playing with his 
fingers, but with something else " (the tortoiseshell that twangs 
the mandoline). He asked the photographer how much a 
mandoline cost. On being told thirty roubles he said he would 
give thirty roubles to be able to play as well as that . Somebody^ 
by way of appreciation, put a cigarette into the mouth of the 
photographer as he was playing. 

I went to bed in the next compartment, but not to sleep, 
because a carpenter, who had the bed opposite mine, told 
me the whole melancholy story of his life. The volunteer 
appeared later ; he had been educated in the Cadet Corps, 
and I asked him if he would soon be an officer. " I will never 
be an officer," he answered ; " I don't want to be one now." I 
asked him if a statement I had read in the newspapers was true, 
to the effect that several officers had telegraphed to the Govern- 
ment that unless they were relieved of police duty they would 
resign. He said it was quite true ; that discontent pre- 
vailed among officers ; that the life was becoming unbearable ; 
that they were looked down upon by the rest of the people ; 
and besides this, they were ordered about from one place to 
another. He liked the officers whom he was with, but they 
were sick of the whole thing. Then, towards one in the 
morning, I got a little sleep. As soon as it was daylight, 
everybody was up making tea and busily discussing politics. 
The priest and the tradesman were having a discussion about 
the Duma, and everyone else, including the guard, was 
joining in. 

" Do you understand what the Duma was ? " said the 
tradesman ; " the Duma was simply the people. Do you know 
what all that talk of a movement of liberation means ? It 
23 



354 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

means simply this : that we want control, responsibility. 
That if you are to get or to pay five roubles or fifty roubles, 
you will get or pay five roubles or fifty roubles, not more and 
not less, and that nobody will have the right to interfere ; and 
that if someone interferes he will be responsible. The first thing 
the Duma asked for was a responsible Ministry, and the reason 
why it was dissolved is that the Government would not give 
that." 

The priest said that he approved of a Duma, but unless 
men changed themselves, no change of government was of any 
use. " Man must change inwardly," he said. 

" I believe in God," answered the tradesman, " but it is 
written in the Scripture that God said : ' Take the earth and 
cultivate it,' and that is what we have got to do — to make the 
hest of this earth. When we die we shall go to Heaven, and 
then " — he spoke in a practical tone of voice which settled the 
matter — " then we shall have to do with God." The priest took 
out his Bible and found a passage in the Gospel. " This re- 
volutionary movement will go on," he said, " nothing can stop 
it now ; but mark my words, we shall see oceans of blood shed 
-first, and this prophecy will come true," and he read the text 
about one stone not being left on another. 

They then discussed the priesthood and the part played by 
priests. " The priests play an abominable part," said the 
tradesman ; " they are worse than murderers. A murderer 
is a man who goes and kills someone. He is not so bad as the 
man who stays at home and tells others to kill. That is what 
the priests do." He mentioned a monk who had preached 
against the Jews in the south of Russia. " I call that man the 
greatest criminal, because he stirred up the peasants' blood 
and they went to kill the Jews. Lots of peasants cease to go to 
church and say their prayers at home because of this. When 
the Cossacks come to beat them, the priests tell them that they 
are sent by God. Do you believe they are sent by God ? " 
he asked, turning to the bearded peasant. 

" No," answered the peasant ; "I think they are sent by 
the devil." The priest said that the universal dominion of the 
Jews was at hand. The tradesman contested this, and said 
that in Russia the Jews were assimilated more quickly than 
in other countries. " The Jews are cunning," said the priest ; 
" the Russians are in a ditch, and they go to the Jews and 



THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 355 

say : ' Pull us out.' " " If that is true," said the tradesman, 
" we ought to put up a gold statue to the Jews for pulling 
us out of the ditch. Look at the time of the pogroms; the 
rich Russians ran away, but the richest Jews stayed behind." 
" They are clever ; they knew their business. If they stayed 
you may be sure they gained something by it," said the merchant 
from Kursk. " But we ought to be clever, too," said the 
tradesman, " and try and imitate their self-sacrifice. Look at 
the Duma. There were twenty Jews in the Duma, but they 
did not bring forward the question of equal rights for the Jews 
before anything else, as they might have done. It is criminal 
for the priests to attack the Jews, and if they go on like this, 
the people will leave them." 

" Whereas," said the merchant from Kursk thoughtfully, 
" if they helped the people, the people would never desert 
them." "The priests," said one of the other nondescript 
people, " say that Catherine the Second is a goddess ; and for 
that reason her descendants have a hundred thousand acres. 
General Trepov will be canonised when he dies, and his bones 
will work miracles." 

The guard joined in here, and told his grievances at great 
length. 

At one of the stations there was a fresh influx of people ; 
among others, an old peasant and a young man in a blouse. 
The old peasant complained of the times. " Formerly we all had 
enough to eat ; now there is not enough," he said. " People 
are clever now. When I was a lad, if I did not obey my grand- 
father immediately, he used to box my ears ; now my son is 
surprised because I don't obey him. People have all become 
clever, and the result is we have got nothing to eat." The 
young man said the Government was to blame for most things. 
" That's a difficult question to be clear about. How can we be 
clear about it ? We know nothing," said the old peasant. 
" You ought to try and know, or else things will never get 
better," said the young man. " I don't want to listen to a 
Barin like you," said the old peasant. " I'm not a Barin, I am 
a peasant, even as thou art," said the young man. " Nonsense," 
said the old peasant. " Thou liest." 

The discussion was then cut short by our arrival at St. 
Petersburg. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

ST. PETERSBURG 

r N October 1906 I took up my duties as correspondent 
to the Morning Post at St. Petersburg. I took an 
apartment on the ground floor of a little street running 
out of the Bolshaya Konioushnaya. 

The situation which was created by the dissolution of the 
Duma was aptly summed up by a Japanese, who said that in 
Russia an incompetent Government was being opposed by an 
ineffectual revolution. Although no active revolution followed 
the dissolution of the Duma, a sporadic civil war spread all over 
the country, accompanied by anarchy, and an epidemic of 
political and social crime. Governors of provinces were blown 
up ; Stolypin's house was blown up, his daughter injured, and he. 
himself only narrowly escaped ; banks were robbed ; policemen 
were shot ; and the political crimes of the Intellectuals were 
imitated on a wider scale by the discontented proletariat and 
the criminal class. 

The professional criminals reasoned thus: "If University 
students can rob a bank in a deserving public cause, why 
should not we tramps rob and kill a banker in a deserving 
private cause ? " " Expropriation " became a fashionable sport 
among the criminals, and the prevalence of anarchy, licence, and 
robbery under arms had the effect of disgusting the man in the 
street with all things revolutionary; for all the disorder was 
rightly or wrongly put down to the revolutionaries. Had 
it not been for this reaction, this turn of the tide in public 
opinion, Stolypin would have found it impossible to 
carry out his drastic measures. On the other hand, the 
Government met the situation with martial law and drum- 
head court-martials ; revolutionary and other crimes were 
answered by reprisals and summary executions ; and daily 

the record of crime and punishment increased, and Russia 

356 



ST. PETERSBURG 357 

seemed to be caught in a vicious circle of repression and 
anarchy. 

The watchword of Stolypin's policy was Order first, Reform 
afterwards. 

He defended the nature of the steps taken to restore order 
by saying that when a house is on fire, in order to save what can 
be saved, you are obliged to hack down what cannot be saved, 
ruthlessly. He certainly did restore order, and he also initiated 
certain large measures which made for reform — his Land Bill 
and his Education Bill ; but all the reforms that were started 
■during his administration were curtailed by his successors ; and 
the idea which ran through the policy of all Russian Governments 
like a baleful thread from 1906 to 1907, was to take back with 
one hand what had been given with the other. 

Consequently the fire of discontent, instead of being ex- 
tinguished, was maintained in a smouldering condition. 

The Manifesto of 30th October 1904 promised, firstly, the 
creation of a deliberative and legislative Assembly, without 
whose consent no new laws should be passed ; and secondly, 
the full rights of citizenship — the inviolability of the person, 
freedom of conscience, freedom of the Press, the right of 
organising public meetings, and founding associations. 

Practically speaking, in the years which followed the grant- 
ing of this Charter until the revolution of 1917, these promises 
were either not carried out at all, or were only allowed to 
operate in virtue of temporary regulations which were (a) liable 
to constant amendment ; (b) could be interpreted by local 
officials. 

Stolypin's policy of " Order first, Reform afterwards," had 
two results : firstly, as soon as order was restored by Stolypin, 
all ideas of reform were shelved by his successors. Stolypin 
himself was assassinated. Secondly, in the eyes of the Ad- 
ministration criticism became the greatest crime, because 
criticism was held to be subversive to the prestige of the 
Government. The officials, and especially the secret police, 
thrived and battened on this situation. Accordingly, as order 
was restored material prosperity increased ; but this was a 
palliative and not a remedy to the fundamental discontent. 
It only led to moral stagnation. 

In the autumn of 1906, while this cycle of anarchy on the 
one hand and repression on the other was setting in, elections 



358 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

were held for another Duma. I had a long talk one day with 
Stolypin himself. He struck one as a man of character, ab- 
solute integrity, rigidce innocentice, and great personal courage. 
But he had come too late on the scene of Russian politics. He 
would have been an admirable minister in the reign of Alexander 
the Second, or Alexander the Third. As it was, he was engaged 
not in diverting a torrent into a useful and profitable channel, 
but in damming it. He succeeded in damming it temporarily ; 
but the dam was bound to be swept away, and he paid for, the 
work with his own life. 

During the winter I saw a great many Russians ; members 
of the Duma used to come and dine with me, and I was in close 
touch with the political life. But the most interesting 
experience I had that winter was a journey I made to the 
north. I will describe it in detail. 

I meant to go to Archangel, and I started for Vologda 
at night. The battle for a place in the third-class carriage 
was fought and won for me by a porter. When I stepped 
into the third-class carriage it was like entering pande- 
monium. It was almost dark, save for a feeble candle that 
guttered peevishly over the door, and all the inmates were 
yelling and throwing their boxes and baskets and bundles 
about. This was only the process of installation ; it all 
quieted down presently, and everyone seated himself with 
his bed unfolded, if he had one, his luggage stowed away, his 
provisions spread out, as if he had been living there for years, 
and meant to remain there for many years to come. 

This particular carriage was full. The people in it were 
workmen going home for the winter, peasants, merchants, and 
mechanics. Opposite to my seat were two workmen (painters), 
and next to them a peasant with a big grey beard. Sitting by 
the farther window was a well-dressed mechanic. The painter 
lighted a candle and stuck it on a small movable table that 
projected from my window ; he produced a small bottle of 
vodka from his pocket, a kettle for tea, and some cold sausage, 
and general conversation began. The guard came to tell the 
people who had come to see their friends off — there were num- 
bers of them in the carriage, and they were most of them drunk 
— to go. The guard looked at my ticket for Vologda and asked 
me where I was ultimately going to. I said: " Viatka," upon 
which the mechanic said : " So am I ; we will go together and 



ST. PETERSBURG 359 

get our tickets together at Vologda." The painter and the 
mechanic engaged in conversation, and it appeared that they 
both came from Kronstadt. The painter had worked there 
for twenty years, and he cross -questioned the mechanic with 
evident pleasure, winking at me every now and then. The 
mechanic went into the next compartment for a moment, and 
the painter then said to me with glee : " He is lying ; he says 
he has worked in Kronstadt, and he doesn't know where such 
and such things are." The mechanic came back. " Who is 
the Commandant at Kronstadt ? " asked the painter. The 
mechanic evidently did not know, and gave a name at random. 
The painter laughed triumphantly and said that the Command- 
ant was someone else. Then the mechanic volunteered further 
information to show his knowledge of Kronstadt ; he talked 
of another man who worked there — a tall man ; the painter said 
that the man was short. The mechanic said that he was em- 
ployed in the manufacture of shells. They talked of disorders 
at Kronstadt that had happened a year before. The painter 
said that he and his son lay among cabbages while the fighting 
was going on. He added that the matter had nearly ended 
in the total destruction of Kronstadt. " God forbid ! " said the 
peasant sitting next to me. No sympathy was expressed with 
the mutineers. The painter at last told the mechanic that he 
had lived for twenty years at Kronstadt, and that he, the 
mechanic, was a liar. The mechanic protested feebly. He was 
an obvious liar, but why he told these lies I have no idea. Per- 
haps he was not a mechanic at all. Possibly he was a spy. 
He professed to be a native of a village near Viatka, and declared 
that he had been absent for six years (the next evening he said 
twelve years). 

From this question of disorders at Kronstadt the talk 
veered, I forget how, to the topic of the Duma. " Which 
Duma ? " someone asked ; "the town Duma ? " " No, the 
State Duma," said the mechanic ; "it seems they are going to 
have a new one." " Nothing will come of it," said the painter ; 
"people will not go." (He meant the voters.) "No, they 
won't go," said the peasant, cutting the air with his hand (a 
gesture common to nearly all Russians of that class), "because 
they know now that it means being put in prison." " Yes," 
said the painter, "they are hanging everybody." And there 
was a knowing chorus of : " They won't go and vote ; they know 



360 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

better." Then the mechanic left his seat and sat down next 

to the painter and said in a whisper : " The Government " 

At that moment the guard came in ; the mechanic stopped 
abruptly, and when the guard went out, the topic of conversation 
had been already changed. I heard no further mention of the 
Duma during the whole of the rest of the journey to Vologda. 
The people then began to prepare to go to sleep, except the 
peasant, who told me that he often went three days together 
without sleep, but when he did sleep it was a business to wake 
him. He asked me if his bundle of clothes was in my way. 
" We are a rough people," he said, " but we know how not to 
get in the way. I am not going far." I was just going to 
sleep when I was wakened by a terrific noise in the next com- 
partment. Someone opened the door, and the following scraps 
of shouted dialogue were audible. A voice : " Did you say I 
was drunk or did you not ? " Second voice (obviously the 
guard) : "I asked for your ticket." First voice : " You said 
I was drunk. You are a liar." Second voice : " You have 
no right to say I am a liar. I asked for your ticket." First 
voice : " You are a liar. You said I was drunk. I will have 
you discharged." This voice then recited a long story to the 
public in general. The next day I learnt that the offended 
man was a lawyer, one of the bourgeoisie (a workman explained 
to me), and that the guard had, in the dark, asked him for his 
ticket, and then, as he made no sign of life, had pinched his foot ; 
this having proved ineffectual, he said that the man was drunk ; 
whereupon the man started to his feet and became wide awake 
in a moment. Eventually a gendarme was brought in, a " pro- 
tocol " was drawn up, in which both sides of the story were 
written down, and there, I expect, the matter will remain until 
the Day of Judgment. 

I afterwards made the acquaintance of two men in the next 
compartment ; they were dock labourers, and their business 
was to load ships in Kronstadt. They were exactly like the 
people whom Gorki describes. One of them gave me a 
description of his mode of life in summer and winter. In 
summer he loaded ships ; in winter he went to a place near 
Archangel and loaded carts with wood ; when the spring came, 
he went back, by water, to St. Petersburg. He asked me what 
I was. I said that I was an English correspondent. He asked 
then what I travelled in. I said I was not that kind of corre- 



ST. PETERSBURG 361 

spondent, but a newspaper correspondent. Here he called a 
third friend, who was sitting near us, and said : " Come and 
look ; there is a correspondent here. He is an English corre- 
spondent." The friend came — a man with a red beard and a 
loose shirt with a pattern of flowers on it. " I don't know you," 
said the new man. " No ; but let us make each other's ac- 
quaintance," I said. " You can talk to him," explained the 
dock labourer ; " we have been talking for hours ; although 
he is plainly a man who has received higher education." " As 
to whether he has received higher or lower education we don't 
know," said the friend, " because we haven't yet asked him." 
Then he paused, reflected, shook hands, and exclaimed : " Now 
we know each other." " But," said the dock labourer, " how 
-do you print your articles ? Do you take a printing press with 
you when you go, for instance, to the north, like you are doing 
now ? " I said they were printed in London, and that I did not 
have to print them myself. " Please send me one," he said ; 
" I will give you my address." " But it's written in English," 
I answered. " You can send me a translation in Russian," he 
retorted. 

" English ships come to Kronstadt, and we load them. The 
men on board do not speak Russian, but we understand each 
other. For instance, we load, and their inspector comes. We 
call him ' inspector ' (I forget the Russian word he used, but it 
was something like skipador) ; they call him the ' Come on.' 
The ' Come on ' comes, and he says, ' That's no good ' (' Niet 
dobro ' x ) ; he means not right (nie horosho), and then we make 
it right. And when their sailors come, we ask them for matches. 
When we have food, what we call coshevar, they call it ' all 
right.' And when we finish work, what we call shabash 
(it means ' all over '), they call ' seven o'clock.' They bring 
us matches that light on anything," and here he produced a 
box of English matches and lit a dozen of them just to show. 
'" When we are ragged, they say, ' No clothes, plenty vodka,' 
and when we are well dressed, they say, ' No plenty-vodka, 
plenty-clothes.' Their vodka," he added, "is very good." 
Then followed an elaborate comparison of the wages and con- 
ditions of life of Russian and English workmen. Another man 
joined in, and being told about the correspondent, said : " I 
would like to read your writings, because we are a rough people 
1 Incorrect Russian, meaning " There is not, good." 



362 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

and we read only the Pieterbourski Listok, which is, so to speak, 
a ' black-gang ' (reactionary) newspaper. Heaven knows what 
is happening in Russia ! They are hanging, shooting, and 
bayoneting everyone." Then he went away. The dock 
labourer went on for hours talking about the " Come on," the 
" All right," and the " Seven o'clock." 

I went back to my berth and slept, till the dock labourer 
came and fetched me, and said that I had to see the soldiers. 
I went into the next compartment, and there were two soldiers ; 
one was dressed up, that is to say he had put on spectacles and 
a pocket-handkerchief over his head, and was giving an exhibi- 
tion of mimicry, of recruits crying as they left home, of mothers- 
in-law, and other stock jokes. It was funny, and it ended in 
general singing. A sailor came to look on. He was a non- 
commissioned officer, and he told me in great detail how a 
meeting at Sveaborg had been put down. He said that the 
loyal sailors had been given 150 roubles (£15) apiece to fight. 
I think he must have been exaggerating. At the same time he 
expressed no sympathy with the mutineers. He said that 
rights were all very well for countries such as Finland. But 
in Russia they only meant disorder, and as long as the disorder 
lasted, Russia would be a feeble country. He had much wanted 
to go to the war, but he had not been able to. In fact, he was 
thoroughly loyal and Hen pensant. 

We arrived at Vologda Station some time in the evening. 
The station was crowded with peasants. WTiile I was watching 
the crowd, a drunken peasant entered and asked everybody to 
give him ten kopecks. Then he caught sight of me, and said 
that he was quite certain I would give him ten kopecks. I did, 
and he danced a kind of wild dance and finally collapsed on 
the floor. A man was watching these proceedings, a fairly 
respectably dressed man in a pea-jacket. He began to talk to 
me, and said that he had just come back from Manchuria, 
where he had been employed at Mukden Station. " In spite of 
which," he added, " I have not yet received a medal." I said 
that I had been in Manchuria. He said he lived twenty versts 
up the line, and came to the station to look at the people — 
it was so amusing. " Have you any acquaintances here ? " he 
asked. I said, " No." " Then let us go and have tea." I was 
willing, and we went to the tea-shop, which was exactly opposite 
the station. " Here," said the man, " we will talk of what was, 



ST. PETERSBURG 363 

of what is, and of what is to be." As we were walking in, a 
policeman who was standing by the door whispered in my ear : 
" I shouldn't go in there with that gentleman." " Why ? " 
I asked. " Well, he's not quite reliable," he answered in the 
softest of whispers. " How ? " I asked. " Well, he killed a 
man yesterday and then robbed him," said the policeman. I 
hurriedly expressed my regret to my new acquaintance, and 
said that I must at all costs return to the station. " The police- 
man has been lying to you," said the man. " It's a lie ; it's 
only because I haven't got a passport." (This was not exactly 
a recommendation in itself.) I went into the first-class waiting- 
room. The man came and sat down next to me, and now that 
I examined his face I saw that he had the expression and the 
stamp of countenance of a born thief. One of the waiters came 
and told him to go, and he flatly refused, and the waiter made a 
low bow to him. Then, gently but firmly, I advised him to go 
away, as it might lead to trouble. He finally said : " All right, 
but we shall meet in the train, in liberty." He went away, but 
he sent an accomplice, who stood behind my chair. He, too y 
had the expression of a thief. 

After waiting for several hours I approached the train for 
Yaroslav. Just as I was getting in, a small boy came up to me 
and said in a whisper : " The policeman sent me to tell you that 
the man is a well-known thief, that he robs people every day, 
and that he gets into the train, even into the first-class carriages, 
and robs people, and he is after you now." I entered a first- 
class carriage and told the guard there was a thief about. I 
had not been there long before the accomplice arrived and 
began walking up and down the corridor. But the guard, I 
am happy to say, turned him out instantly, and I saw nothing 
more of the thief or of his accomplice. 

A railway company director, or rather a man who was 
arranging the purchase of a line, got into the carriage and began 
at once to harangue me about the Government and say that 
the way in which it had changed the election law was a piece of 
insolence and would only make everybody more radical. Then 
he told me that life in Yaroslav was simply intolerable, because 
all newspapers and all free discussion had been stopped. We 
arrived at Yaroslav on the next morning. I went on to Moscow 
in a third-class carriage. The train stopped at every small 
station, and there was a constant flow of people coming and 



364 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

going. An old gentleman of the middle class sat opposite 
to me for a time, and read a newspaper in an audible whisper. 
Whenever he came to some doings of the Government he said : 
■" Disgraceful, disgraceful ! " 

Later on in the day a boy of seventeen got into the train. 
He carried a large box. I was reading a book by Gogol, and 
had put it down for a moment on the seat. He took it up and 
said : " I am very fond of reading books." I asked him how he 
had learnt. He said he had been at school for one year, and 
had then learnt at home. He could not stay at school as he 
was the only son, his father was dead, and he had to look after 
his small sisters ; he was a stone quarrier, and life was very hard. 
He loved reading. In winter the moujiks came to him and he 
read aloud to them. His favourite book was called Ivan 
Mazeppa. What that work may be, I did not know. I gave him 
my Gogol. I have never seen anyone so pleased. He began 
to read it — at the end — -then and there, and said it would last 
for several evenings. When he got out he said : " I will never 
forget you," and he took out of his pocket a lot of sunflower 
seeds and gave them to me. As we neared Moscow the carriage 
was fuller and fuller. Two peasants had no railway tickets. 
One of them asked me if I would lend my ticket to him to show 
the guard. I said : " With pleasure ; only, my ticket is for Moscow 
and yours is for the next station." When the guard came, one 
of the peasants gave him 30 kopecks. " That is very little 
for two of you," the guard said. They had been travelling 
nearly all the way from Yaroslav ; but finally he let them be. 
We arrived at Moscow in the evening. 

I travelled back to St. Petersburg in a third-class carriage, 
which was full of recruits. " They sang all the way " (as Jowett 
said about the poetical but undisciplined undergraduate x whom 
he drove home from a dinner-party) "bad songs — very bad 
songs." Not quite all the way, however. They were like school- 
boys going to a private school, putting on extra assurance. In 
the railway carriage there was a Zemstvo " Feldsher," a hospital 
orderly, who had been through the war. We talked of the war. 
While we were discussing it, a young peasant who was in the 
carriage joined in, and startled us by his sensible and acute 
observations on the war. " There's a man," said the Feldsher 
to me, " who has a good head. It is sheer natural clever- 
1 A. C. Swinburne. 



ST. PETERSBURG 365 

ness. That's what a lot of the young peasants are like. And 
what will become of him ? If only these people could be 
developed ! " A little later I began to read a small book. 
" Are you reading Lermontov ? " asked the Feldsher. " No," 
I answered, " I am reading Shakespeare's Sonnets." " Ah," 
he said, with a sigh, " you are evidently not a married man, but 
perhaps you are engaged to be married ? " 

Just as I was preparing to sleep, the guard came and began 
to search the corners and the floor of the carriage with a candle, 
as if he had dropped a pin or a penny. He explained that 
there were twelve recruits in the carriage, but that an extra 
man had got in with them and that he was looking for him. 
He then went away. One of the recruits explained to me that 
the man was under one of the seats, and hidden by boxes, as he 
wished to go to St. Petersburg without a ticket. I went to 
sleep. But the guard came back and turned me carefully over 
to see if I was the missing man. Then he began to look again 
in the most unlikely places for a man to be hid. He gave up 
the search twice, but the hidden man could not resist putting 
out his head to see what was happening, and before he could 
get it back the guard coming in at that moment caught sight of 
him. The man was turned out, but he got into the train again, 
and the next morning it was discovered that he had stolen one 
of the recruits' boxes and some article of property from nearly 
everybody in the carriage, including hats and coats. This he 
had done while the recruits slept, for when they stopped 
singing and went to sleep they slept soundly. Later in the 
night, a huge and old peasant entered the train and crept under 
the seat opposite to me. The guard did not notice him, and 
after the tickets had been collected from the passengers who 
got in at that station, the man crept out, and lay down on one 
of the higher berths. He remained there nearly all night, but 
at one of the stations the guard said : " Is there no one for this 
station ? " and looking at the peasant, added : " Where are you 
for, old man ? " The man mumbled in pretended sleep. " Where 
is your ticket ? " asked the guard. No answer. At last when the 
question had been repeated thrice, he said : "lama poor, little, 
old man." " You haven't got a ticket," said the guard. " Get 
out, devil ; you might lose me my place— and I a married man. 
Devil ! Devil ! Devil ! " " It is on account of my extreme 
poverty," said the old man, and he was turned out. 



366 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

The next morning I had a long conversation with the young 
peasant who, the Feldsher said, had brains. I asked him, 
among other things, if he thought the Government was right 
in relying on what it called the innate and fundamental con- 
servatism of the great mass of the Russian people. " If the 
Government says that the whole of the peasantry is Conser- 
vative, it lies," he said. " It is true that a great part of the 
people is rough — uneducated — but there are many who know. 
The war opened our eyes. You see, the Russian peasant is 
accustomed to be told by the authorities that a glass (taking 
up my tumbler) is a man, and to believe it. The Army is on 
the side of the Government. At least it is really on the side 
of the people, but it feels helpless. The Government will 
never yield except to force. There is nothing to be done." We 
talked of other things. The recruits joined in the conversation, 
and I offered a small meat patty to one of them, who said : 
" No, thank you. I am greatly satisfied with you as it is, 
without your giving me a meat patty." 

The theft which had taken place in the night was discussed 
from every point of view. " We took pity on him and we hid 
him," they said, " and he robbed us." They spoke of it without 
any kind of bitterness or grievance, and nobody said : 

" I told you so." Then we arrived at St. Petersburg. 



CHAPTER XIX 

TRAVEL IN RUSSIA 

A FTER Christmas, the second Duma was convened 
/-A and opened. Its doings were not interesting. It 
was not a representative body, as the elections had 
been carefully arranged ; still it was better than nothing, 
and the very existence of a Duma of any kind exercised a 
negative effect on matters in general. The Government could 
be interpolated. Questions could be asked. The officials in 
the country knew that their doings could be discussed in the 
Duma, and this acted as a check. In April 1907, I had an 
interview with Count Witte. Witte was a large, tall, burly 
figure, with slightly ravaged features, intelligent eyes, the 
facile opportunism and the deep-seated scepticism of those 
who have had a long experience of affairs, of the ruling of men, 
and the vicissitudes of political life. He received me abruptly, 
and with a manner that, far from being ingratiating, seemed to 
express the unspoken thought, " Why have you come to bother 
me," but as the conversation went on he melted and became 
charming. 

The first question he asked me was why I stayed such a 
long time in Russia. I said it was because it interested me. 
I then said : " Things seem to be going better." " Do you 
think so ? " he asked, with a look of amused scepticism. I 
asked him what he thought of the doings of the Extreme Right, 
the reactionaries, who were now playing a noisy and important 
part in political and social life. 

He said they were a great danger. The Government would 

never dare to touch them. He said both the Right and the 

Kadets had lost faith in him. The Kadets because he had not 

given them the key of the fortress, and the reactionaries hated 

him because he had not hung all the Liberals. He talked of 

the Jewish question, and said that the Jews had begged him 

367 



368 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

not to give them full rights, as they dreaded the consequences, 
of a sudden act of that kind. He said he had always thought 
it impossible to give the Jews full rights all at once. He said 
the Kadets were guilty of all that had happened in Russia in 
the last year, because they had refused to support him when 
he was Prime Minister, and had been unwilling to help him. 
Had they done so he might have done a great deal. He then 
talked of Stolypin. He said Stolypin was an honest man, with 
no foresight, and a fatalist. " You can't govern if you are a 
fatalist," he said, with a gesture of contempt. He said the 
present electoral law was a farce, and that the only alternative 
was to change it or to go back to the pre-Duma state of affairs ; 
and that would not last long. He said that the Kadets re- 
cognised their mistakes now, and their failure, and he heard 
from all quarters they were willing to accept his leadership now, 
but it was too late. For a thousand reasons he would never 
take office again after what he had gone through. I asked him 
how the funds had been obtained for the great general strike. 
He said it had all been prepared when Plehve was Minister, and 
had been kept secret. He said he considered the situation in 
October to have been one of real revolution, as there were then 
no troops available to deal with the situation. 

The impression he gave me was of disillusion, indifference, 
fatigue, and invincible pessimism. He evidently thought that 
whatever steps would be taken would be fatal, and he was 
perfectly right. 

In May I went back to London and stayed there till the 
middle of July, when I came back to St. Petersburg. 

I then started for a journey down the Volga. I went by 
train from St. Petersburg to Ribinsk. On the way to Ribinsk 
my carriage was occupied by a party of workmen, including" 
a carpenter and a wheelwright, who were going to work on 
somebody's property in the Government of Tver ; they did 
not know whose property, and they did not know whither 
they were going. They were under the authority of an old 
man who came and talked to me, because, he said, the com- 
pany of the youths who were with him was tedious. He told 
me a great many things, but as he was hoarse, and the train 
made a rattling noise, I could not hear a word he said. There 
were also in the carriage two Tartars and a small boy about 
thirteen years old, who had a domineering character and put 



TRAVEL IN RUSSIA 369 

himself in charge of the carriage. The discomfort of travelling 
third-class inRussia was not the accommodation, but the frequent 
awakenings during the night caused by passengers coming in 
and by the guard asking for one's ticket. The small boy with 
the domineering character — he wore an old military cap on 
the back of his head as a sign of strength of purpose — con- 
tributed in no small degree to the general discomfort. He 
apparently was in no need of sleep. He went from passenger 
to passenger telling them where they would have to change 
and where they would have to get out, and offering to open 
the window if needed. I had a primitive candlestick made 
of a candle stuck into a bottle ; it fell on my head just as I 
went to sleep, so I put it on the floor and went to sleep again. 
But the small boy came and waked me, and told me that my 
bottle was on the floor, and that he had put it back again. 
I thanked him, but directly he was out of sight I put it back 
again on the floor, and before long he came back, waked me a. 
second time — and told me that my candlestick had again 
fallen down. This time I told him, not without emphasis, 
to leave it alone, and I went to sleep again. But the little 
boy was not defeated ; he waked me again with the informa- 
tion that a printed advertisement had fallen out of the book 
I had been reading on to the floor. This time I told him 
that if he waked me again I should throw him out of the 
window. 

Later in the night a tidy-looking man of the middle-class 
entered the carriage with his wife. They began to chatter, 
and to complain of the length of the benches, the officious 
boy with the domineering character lending them his sympathy 
and advice. This went on till one of the Tartars could bear 
it no longer, and he called out in a loud voice that if they 
wanted beds six yards long they had better not travel in a 
train, and that they were making everybody else's sleep 
impossible. I blessed that Tartar not unawares, and after 
that there was peace. 

Towards ten o'clock in the morning we arrived at Ribinsk, 
and there I embarked on a steamer to go down the Volga, as 
far as Nijni-Novgorod. I took a first-class ticket and received 
a clean deck cabin, containing a leather sofa (with no blankets 
or sheets) and a washing-stand with a fountain tap. We 
started at two o'clock in the afternoon. There were few 
24 



370 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

passengers on board. The Volga was not what I had expected 
it would be like — what place is ? I had imagined a vast 
expanse of water in an illimitable plain, instead of which there 
was a broad, brown river, with green, shelving though not 
steep banks, wooded with birch trees and fir trees and many 
kinds of shrubs ; sometimes the banks consisted of sloping 
pastures and sometimes of cornfields. In the evening we 
arrived at Yaroslav, a picturesque little city on the top of a 
steep bank. All day long the sky had been grey and heavy, 
with long, piled-up clouds, but the sun, as it set, made for itself 
a thin strip of gold beneath the grey masses, and when it had 
sunk, the masses themselves glinted like armour, and the strip 
beneath became a stretch of pure and luminous twilight. In 
the twilight the town was seen at its best. I went ashore 
and walked about the streets of the quiet city ; a sleepy 
town, with trees and grass everywhere (the trees dark in the 
twilight) ; the houses low, two-storied, and painted white, 
with pale green roofs, ghostlike in the dusk, ornamented 
wdth pilasters, eighteenth-century and Empire arches and 
arcades. Every now and then one came across a church with 
gilt minarets glistening in what remained of the sunset. 
The whole was a symphony in dark green, white, and lilac 
(the sky was lilac by now). The shops were shut, the 
houses shuttered, the passers-by few. The grass grew thick 
on the cobble-stones. I wandered about thinking how well 
Vernon Lee would seize on the genius loci of this sleepy 
city, dreaming in the lilac July twilight, with its alternate 
vistas of luminous white houses and dark glooms of trees. 
How she would extract the spirit of the place, and find the 
exact note in other places which it corresponded with, whether 
in Gascony, or Tuscany, or Bavaria ; and I reflected that all 
I could do would be to say I had seen Yaroslav — I had walked 
about in it — and that it was a picturesque city. 

We left Yaroslav at eleven at night. In the dining-room 
of the steamer I had left a Tauchnitz volume called Frdulein 
Schmidt und Mr. Anstruther, by the author of Elizabeth and 
her German Garden. I was looking forward to reading this 
before going to sleep ; but this was not to be. The volume 
had disappeared. The next morning the matter was explained. 
There was a family travelling in the steamer, consisting of a 
mother, a daughter, and a son. The mother was young 



TRAVEL IN RUSSIA 371 

looking, although both the daughter and son were grown up ; 
they had found the book, and thought (I suppose) it had been 
left behind, or that it belonged to the public library. The 
book occupied them for the rest of the journey. They talked 
of nothing else. The mother had read it before. The daughter 
must have sat up late reading it, because she handed it over 
to the son early in the morning. They all thought it 
interesting, but they evidently disagreed about it. These 
are the things which ought to please an author. 

We reached Nijni-Novgorod the next morning at eight. I 
took a cab. " Drive," I said, " to the best hotel." " There is 
the Hotel Rossia at the top of the town, and the Hotel Peters- 
burg at the bottom," the cabman answered. " Which is the 
best ? " I asked. " The Hotel Rossia is the best at the top 
of the town," he answered, " and the Hotel Petersburg is the 
best at the bottom." " Which is the most central ? " I asked. 
" The Rossia is the most central at the top, and the Petersburg 
is the most central at the bottom." " Which is nearest the 
Fair ? " " They are neither near the Fair." " Are there no 
hotels near the Fair ? " " There are no hotels near the Fair 
in the town." 

We drove to the Rossia, a long way up a very steep hill, 
past the Kremlin — a hill like Windsor Hill, only twice as long. 
The Kremlin is like Windsor, supposing the outside walls of 
Windsor had never been restored and the castle were taken 
away. When we got to the hotel the cabman said : " This 
part of the town is deserted in summer ; nobody lives here ; 
everybody lives near the Fair." " But I said I wanted to be 
in the Fair," I answered. " Oh ! " he answered ; " of course 
if you want to be in the Fair there are plenty of hotels in the 
Fair." So we drove down again, right into the lower part of 
the town, and thence across a large wooden bridge into the Fair. 

Nijni-Novgorod occupies both sides of the Volga. On one 
side there is a steep hill, a Kremlin, and a town covering the 
hill till it reaches the quays and extending along them; — on 
the other side a huge plain and the Fair. The hill part of the 
town is wooded and green ; the Fair was a town in itself, and 
during the Fair period the whole business of life — shops, including 
hotels, theatres, banks, baths, post, exchange, restaurants — was 
transferred thither. The shops were one-storied and occupied 
square blocks, which they intersected in parallel lines. They 



372 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

were of every description and quality, ranging from the supply 
of the needs of the extremely rich to those of the extremely 
poor. I found a room in an hotel. The hotels were crowded, 
although I was told that the Fair had never been so 
empty. It had not been open long, and merchants were still 
arriving daily with their goods. The centre of the Fair was a 
house called the " Glavnii Dom," the principal house ; here the 
post and the police were concentrated, and the most important 
shops — Faberge, for instance. There were many dealers in 
furs and skins ; I bought nothing, in spite of great tempta- 
tion, except a blanket and a clothes-brush. The blankets 
were dear. Star sapphires, on the other hand, seemed to be 
as cheap as dirt. I never quite understood when the people 
had their meals at the Fair. The restaurants, and there were 
many, seemed to be empty all day ; they were certainly full 
all night. Perhaps the people did not eat during the daytime. 
In every restaurant there was a theatrical performance, which 
began at nine o'clock in the evening and went on until four 
o'clock the next morning, with few interruptions ; it consisted 
mostly of singing and dancing. 

What surprised and struck me most about the Fair was 
the great size of it. I had not guessed that the Fair was a 
large town consisting entirely of shops, hotels, and restaurants. 
The most important merchandise that passed hands at the 
Fair was furs. But there were goods of every variety : 
second-hand books, tea, and silks from China, gems from the 
Urals, and art nouveau furniture. There were also old curiosity 
shops rich in church vestments, stiff copes and jewelled 
chasubles, which would be found most useful by those people 
who like to furnish their drawing-rooms entirely with objects 
diverted from their proper use ; that is to say, teapots made 
out of musical instruments and old book bindings. Nijni, 
during the Fair, was almost entirely inhabited by merchants 
— merchants of every kind and description. The majority 
of them wore loose Russian shirts and top-boots. I noticed 
that at Nijni it did not in the least signify how untidily 
one was dressed ; however untidy one looked, one was sure of 
being treated with respect, because slovenliness at Nijni did 
not necessarily imply poverty, and the people of the place 
justly reasoned that however sordid our exterior appearance 
might be, there was no knowing but it might clothe a million- 



TRAVEL IN RUSSIA 373 

aire. Another thing which struck me here, a thing which has 
struck me in several other places, was the way in which people 
determined your nationality by your clothes. While they paid 
no attention to degree in the matter of clothes at Nijni, as to 
whether they were shabby or new, they paid a great deal of 
attention to kind. For instance, the day I arrived I was wear- 
ing an ordinary English straw hat. This headgear caused quite 
a sensation amongst the sellers of Astrakan fur. They crowded 
round me, crying out : " Vairy nice, vairy cheap, Engleesh." 
I bought a different kind of hat, a white yachting cap, and 
loose silk Russian shirt, such as the merchants wore. 

That evening I went to a restaurant at which there was a 
musical performance. I fell into conversation with a young 
merchant sitting at the next table, and he said to me after we 
had had some conversation : " You are, I suppose, from the 
Caucasus." I said " No." We talked of other things, the 
Far East among other topics. He then exclaimed : " You are, 
I suppose, from the Far East." I again said "No," and we 
again talked of other things. He had some friends with him 
who joined in the conversation, and they were consumed with 
curiosity as to whence I had come, and I told them they could 
guess. They guessed various places, such as Archangel, Irkutsk, 
Warsaw, and Saghalien, and at last one of them cried out with 
joy : "I know what place you belong to ; you are a native of 
Nijni." They went away triumphant. Their place was taken 
by a very old merchant, a rugged, grey-haired, bearded peasant. 
He looked on at the singing and dancing which was taking 
place on the stage for some time, and then he said to me : 
" Don't you wish you were twenty years younger ? " I 
said I did, but I did not think that I should in that case be 
better equipped for this particular kind of entertainment, as 
I should be only twelve years old. " Impossible ! " said the 
old man indignantly. " You are quite bald, and bear every 
sign of old age." 

I left Nijni on the wrong steamer — that is to say, by a line 
I did not mean to patronise, because I knew it was the worst. 
There was no help for it, because my passport was not ready 
in time. I took a first-class cabin on a big steamer full of 
children with their nurses and parents. The children ran about 
the cabin all day long without stopping. Children, I noticed, 
are the same all over the' world]: they /play the same games, 



374 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

they make the same noise. In this case there were five sisters 
and a small brother. What reminded me much of all children 
in general, and of my own experience as a child in particular, 
was that the boy suddenly began to howl because his sisters 
wouldn't let him play with them, and he cried out : " I want to 
play too " ; and the sisters, when the matter was finally brought 
before an arbitration court of parents, who were playing cards, 
said that the boy made all games impossible. Also there 
were three nurses in the cabin, who, whatever the children did, 
told them not to do it ; and every now and then one heard 
familiar phrases such as " Don't sit on the oilcloth with your 
bare legs." " Don't lean out of the window with that cold 
of yours." The passengers on the boat were uninteresting. 

There was a couple who spoke bad French to each other 
out of refinement, but who relapsed into Russian when they 
had really something interesting to say. There was a student 
who played the pianoforte with astonishing facility and amazing 
execution ; there were the elder sisters of the small children, 
who also played the pianoforte in exactly the same way as young 
people play it in England — that is to say, with convulsive jerks 
over the difficult passages, and uninterrupted insistence on the 
loud pedal, and a foolish bass. The grown-up members of 
the party played " Vindt " all day. 

When we arrived at Kazan I got out to look at the town. 
It also possesses a Kremlin with white walls and crenellated 
towers and old churches, a museum of uninteresting objects, 
and a large monastery. It was the most stagnant -looking city. 
The Volga beyond Nijni is considerably broader. It is never 
less than 1200 yards in breadth, and from Nijni onwards, on the 
right bank of the river, there is a range of lofty hills, mostly 
wooded, but sometimes rocky and grassy, which go sheer down 
into the river. The left bank is flat, and consists of green 
meadows. Below Kazan it is joined by the river Kama, and 
becomes a mighty river, never less than three-quarters of a 
mile in breadth. In various parts of its course the Volga 
reminded me of almost every river I had ever seen, from 
the Dart to the Liao-he, and from the Neckar to the Nile. 
Below Kazan its aspect was gloomy and sombre, a great 
stretch of broad brown waters, a wooded mountainous bank 
on one side, a monotonous plain on the other. But when the 
weather was fine — and it was gloriously fine after we reached 



TRAVEL IN RUSSIA 375 

Kazan — the effects of light on the great expanse of water were 
miraculous. It is at dawn that you feel the magic of these 
waters ; at dawn and at sunset when the great broad expanse, 
turning to gold or to silver, according as the sky is crimson, 
mauve, or rosy and grey, has a mystery and majesty of its own. 
We met other steamers on the way, but during the whole voyage 
from Nijni to Astrakan we only passed two small sailing boats. 

I got out at Samara and spent the night at an hotel. The 
next day I embarked again for Astrakan, after having explored 
the town, in which I failed to find an object of interest. From 
Samara to Saratov the hills on the right bank of the river 
diminish in size, and instead of descending sheer into the river, 
they slope away from it ; and as the hills diminish, the vegetation 
grows more scanty. The left bank is flat and monotonous as 
before. From Samara to Saratov I travelled third-class, to 
see what it was like on board the steamer. There are on the 
steamer four official classes and an unofficial fifth-class. The 
third-class have a general cabin on the lower deck with two tiers 
of bunks. The fourth-class have a kind of enclosure, which 
contains one large broad board on which they encamp. The 
fourth-class contains the " steerage " passengers. It is in- 
describably dirty. The fifth-class is composed of still dirtier 
and still poorer people, who lie about on boxes, bales, or on 
whatever vacant space they can find on the lower deck. They 
lie, for the most part, like corpses, in a profound slumber, gener- 
ally face downwards, flat upon the floor. The third-class is 
respectable and decently clean ; it has, moreover, one immense 
advantage — some permanently open windows. In the first- 
class there was among the company a great aversion to draughts. 
They had not what someone once called " La passion des Anglais 
pour les courants d'air." In the third-class there was no such 
prejudice. The passengers were various. There were two 
students, some merchants, twenty Cossacks going home on 
leave, a policeman, a public servant, several peasants, and a 
priest. 

On the bunk just over mine sprawled a large bearded 
Cossack, who at once asked me where I was going, my occupa- 
tion, my country, and my name. I told him that I was a 
newspaper correspondent and an Englishman. I then lay 
down on my bunk. Another Cossack from the other side of the 
cabin called out at the top of his voice to the man who was 



376 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

over me : " Who is that man ? " " He is a foreigner." " Is 
he travelling with goods ? " " No ; he is just travelling, nothing 
more." " Where does he come from ? " "I don't know." 
Then, looking down at me from his bunk, the Cossack who was 
above me said : " Thou art quite bald, little father. Is it illness 
that did it, or nature? " " Nature," I answered. "Shouldst 
try an ointment," he said. " I have tried many and strong 
ointments," I said, " including onion, tar, and paraffin, none of 
which were of any avail. There is nothing to be done." " No," 
said the Cossack, with a sigh. " There is nothing to be done. 
It is God's business." 

There was no particular discomfort in travelling third-class 
in the steamer. The bunks, with the aid of blankets, were as 
comfortable as those in the first-class. One could obtain the 
same food, and there was plenty of fresh air. Nevertheless, 
if one only travelled thus for a day and a night, it was in- 
describably fatiguing, because one had to change and readjust 
one's hours. For at the first streak of dawn, the people began 
to talk, and by sunrise they had washed and were having tea. 
It is not as if they went to bed earlier. For all day long they 
talked, and they went to sleep quite late, about eleven. But 
they had the blessed gift, possessed by Napoleon, of snatching 
half -hours or five minutes of sleep whenever they felt in need 
of it. If one travelled like this for several days running, one 
got used to it, of course, and one also acquired the habit of 
snatching sleep at odd moments during the daytime ; but if one 
travelled like this for a day or two, it was, as I have said 
already, extremely tiring. 

The public servant, who had a small post in some provincial 
town, came and talked to me. He asked me if Chaliapine, the 
famous singer, had sung at Nijni. Chaliapine, he added, was 
his master. " I have," he said, " a magnificent bass voice." 
" Are you fond of music ? " I asked. " Fond of music ! " he 
cried. " When I hear music I am like a wild animal. I go 
mad." " Do you mean to go on the stage ? " I asked. " Yes," 
he said, " when I have learnt enough. In the meantime I am 
a public servant — I am in the Government service." " That, 
I suppose, you find tedious ? " I said. " It is more than tedious ; 
it is disgusting," and he began to abuse the Government. I 
said : " There is a great difference between the Russia of to-day 
and the Russia of four years ago." "There is no difference 



TRAVEL IN RUSSIA 377 

at all," he said ; " we have obtained absolutely nothing except 
paper promises." I said : " I am not talking of what the Govern- 
ment has done or failed to do ; I am talking of the general 
aspect of things, of Russian life as it strikes a foreigner. I was 
here three or four years ago, and I am struck by the great 
difference between then and now. Had I met you then, you 
would not have talked politics with me ; there were no politics 
to talk." " That is true," he answered ; " we have now a 
political life." 

Here one of the Cossacks asked him who he was. " I am a 
famous singer," he answered. " I have sung at the Merchants' 

Club at the district town of A . I am a pupil of Chaliapine, 

who is the king of basses and is well known throughout the 
whole civilised world, and who has sung in America. He is a 
Russian. Think of that." The Cossack seemed impressed. 
The singer got out at one of the stations. 

The people in the cabin had their meals at different times 
of the day; the chief meal was tea, which took place twice a 
day. Every time we stopped at a place a crowd of beggars 
invaded our cabin asking for alms. The interesting point is 
that they received them. They were never sent empty away, 
and were invariably given either some coppers, some bread, or 
some melon. I am sure there is no country in the world where 
people give so readily to the poor as in Russia. One had only 
to walk about the streets in any Russian town to notice this 
fact. Here in the third-class saloon it especially struck me. 
I did not see one single beggar turned away without a gift of 
some kind. One little boy was given a piece of bread and a 
large slice of water-melon. 

At the many small stations at which we called on the banks 
of the river there were crowds of itinerant vendors selling 
various descriptions of food — hot pies, fried fish, gigantic 
water-melons, apples, red currants, and cucumbers. The 
whole duration of each stop at any of these places was occupied 
by the unloading and loading of the steamer with goods. This 
was done by a horde of creatures in red and blue shirts called 
loaders, who had a kind of ledge strapped on to their backs 
which enabled them to support enormous loads. Like big 
gnomes, during the whole of the stop, they scurried from the 
hold of the steamer to the wooden quay and back again to the 
steamer. On the quay itself, either placidly looking on and 



378 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

munching sunflower seeds, or else wildly gesticulating over a. 
bargain at a booth, a motley herd of passengers and inhabitants 
of the place swarmed : many-coloured, bright, ragged, and 
squalid, like the crowds depicted in a sacred picture waiting 
for a miracle or a parable under the burning sky of Palestine. 

Samara and Saratov have not the features which characterise 
the towns of the Upper Volga. They have no Kremlin, no 
remains of a fortress dominating the town and enclosed in old 
walls. Saratov is a collection of wooden houses which look as 
if they had been made by a Swiss artisan for the Earl's Court 
Exhibition and exposed on the side of a steep hill. 

Between Saratov and Tzaritsin the character of the river 
changes altogether, the vegetation begins to dwindle ; the great 
hills on the right bank of the river diminish, and the farther one 
travels south, the lower they become. The left bank is flat, 
monotonous, and green as before. The river itself broadens, 
and in some places it is several kilometres wide. You get the 
impression that you are travelling on a large lake or on a sea, 
rather than on a river. The farther south one travels, the 
greater is the beauty of the river. It is a solemn, majestic 
river ; one understands its having been the mother and in- 
spirer of a quantity of poetry, of folk-song and folk-lore ; and 
one understands, too, how appropriate the deep octaves, the 
broad, slow-dying notes and echoes of the Volga songs are to 
these great, melancholy spaces of shining water. Every day 
on the steamer between Saratov and Astrakan I awoke at dawn 
and went out on to the deck to sniff the freshness and to watch 
the process of daybreak. The soft, grey sky trembled into a 
delicate tint of lilac, and over the far-off banks of the river, 
which were distant enough to have the appearance of a range 
of violet hills, came the first blush of dawn, and then a deeper 
rose, while the whole upper sky was washed with a clean 
daffodil colour, which was reflected in silver on the blue water. 
And then the sun rose — a huge red ball of fire, casting golden 
scales beneath him on to the water. 

Towards noon, perhaps, the sky would be piled with white 
clouds, and the river look like an immense hard glass, reflect- 
ing in unruffled detail every curve and shadow of the cloudland, 
and the small motionless trees of the banks which in the sun- 
less heat are as unreal as a mirage. Later in the afternoon the 
water seemed to grow more and more luminous ; the sensation 



TRAVEL IN RUSSIA 379 

of some kind of enchantment, of something wizard-like and un- 
real, increased, and one would not have been surprised to catch 
sight of the walls of Tristram's Castle-in-the-air, the wizard walls, 
to which he promised to bring Iseult — the castle built of the 
stuff which rainbows are made of, of fire, dew, and the colours 
of the morning. But with the sunset this feeling of unreality 
and enchantment ceased ; the nearer bank stood out in sharp 
outline, intensely real, between purple skies and grey waters ; 
and over the farther bank hung the intense blue of woody 
distances. Between Tzaritsin and Astrakan the character 
of the river changes yet again. The hills on the right bank 
vanish altogether ; both the banks were flat now — unlimited 
steppes with scant vegetation, culminating in steep banks of 
yellow sand. It was here that the river reminded me of 
the Nile. 

Tzaritsin itself is a great trade centre ; the best caviare 
and the best water-melons used to be obtained there. Most of 
the third-class passengers got out at Tzaritsin. I was amused 
by the process, which I watched on shore, of a huge block 
of stone being hauled up a hill by a gang of workmen. 
The spectacle was so utterly unlike anything in other 
countries. Pieces of rock are also hauled up hills in other 
lands, but the manner in which it is done is different. Seven 
men were hauling the rope ; they were ragged, dirty, and 
dressed in red and blue shirts, stained and dusty, while 
their tufts of yellow hair stuck out of their tattered peaked 
caps. By the block of stone stood the leader of the gang. 
Then suddenly, when he thought the time had come, he intoned 
a chant, a solo, about fifteen notes, which might have been 
written in the Scotch scale (the scale of G major without the 
F sharp), plaintive and unexpected ; then he beat time with a 
wave of his left hand, and at the fourth beat, the whole gang 
chimed in, imitating the melody in a rough counterpoint, and 
hauling as they sang, and then abruptly ending on the dominant. 
After a short pause, the leader again intoned his solo and the 
chorus again repeated and imitated the plaintive melody, and 
this was repeated till the block of stone was hauled up the 
hill. 

The climate, when Tzaritsin was passed, grew hotter and 
hotter, and the breeze made by the steamer only increased the 
heat. The moon rose, and for a while the sky was still tinged 



380 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

with the stain of the sunset in the west, and the water was 
luminous with a living whiteness. Then, rapidly, because the 
twilight did not last long here, came the darkness, and with it 
something strange and wonderful. We became conscious of an 
extraordinary fragrance in the air. It was not merely the 
sweetness of summer night. It was a pungent and aromatic 
incense which pervaded the atmosphere — warm and delicious 
and filled with the essence of summer. It was intoxicating ; 
it came over you like a great wave, a breath of Elysium. 
And the night with its web of stars, and the dark waters, 
and the thin line of the far-off banks, made you once more 
lose the sense of reality. You had reached another world — 
the nether-world, perhaps ; you breathed " the scent of alien 
meadows far away," and you felt as if you were sailing down 
the river of oblivion to the harbours of Proserpine. This 
wonderful sweetness came, I learnt, from the new-mown hay, 
the mowing of which takes place late here. The hay lay in 
great masses over the steppes, embalming the midnight air and 
turning the world into paradise. 

On reaching Astrakan, you were plunged into the atmosphere 
of the East. On the quays there were many booths groaning 
with every kind of fruit, and a coloured herd of people 
living in the dust and the dirt ; splendidly squalid, noisy 
as parrots, and busy doing nothing, like wasps. The rail- 
way to Astrakan was not yet finished, so you were obliged 
to return to Tzaritsin by 'steamer if you wished to get back 
to the centre of Russia. I pursued this course, and from 
Tzaritsin took the train for Tambov. The train started from 
Tzaritsin at two o'clock in the morning ; I arrived at the station 
at midnight, and at t]iis hour the station was crammed with 
people. Imagine a huge high waiting-room with three tables 
d'hote parallel to each other in the centre of it ; at one end 
-of the hall a buffet ; on the sides of it, under the windows, 
tables and long seats padded with leather, partitioned off and 
forming open cubicles. These seats were always occupied, 
and the occupants went to bed on them, wrapped up in blankets, 
and propped up by pillows, bags, rugs, baskets, kettles, and 
other impedimenta. The whole of this refreshment hall was 
filled with sleeping figures. There were people lying asleep on 
the window-sills, and others on chairs placed together. Some 
merely laid their heads on the table d'hote, and fell into a 



TRAVEL IN RUSSIA 381 

deep slumber. It was like the scene in The Sleeping Beauty 
in the Wood, when sleep overtook the inhabitants of the castle. 
There was a bookstall and a newspaper kiosk. The bookstall 
contained — as usual — the works of Jerome K. Jerome and 
Conan Doyle, some translations of French novels, some political 
pamphlets, a translation of John Morley's Compromise, and an 
essay on Ruskin — a strange medley of literary food. At the 
newspaper kiosk, the newsvendor was so busily engrossed in 
reading out a story, which had just appeared in the newspapers,, 
about a saintly peasant who killed a baby because he thought it 
was the Antichrist, that it was impossible to attract his atten- 
tion. His audience were the policeman, one of the porters, and 
a kind of sub-guard. The story was indeed a curious one, and 
caused a considerable stir. I wrote about it later on in the 
Morning Post. 

The journey to Tambov was long ; in my carriage a rail- 
way official drank tea, ate apples, and sighed over the political 
condition of the country. Everything was as bad as bad 
could be. " It is a sad business," he said, " living in Russia 
now." Then, after some reflection, he added : " But, perhaps 
in other countries — in England, for instance — people sometimes 
find fault with the Government." I told him they did little 
else. He then took a large roll out of a basket, and after he 
had been munching it for some time, he said : " After all, there 
is no country in the world where such good bread can be got 
as this." This seemed to console him greatly. 

The sunflower season had arrived. Sunflowers used to be 
grown in great quantities in Russia, not for- ornamental but 
for utilitarian purposes. They were grown for the oil that 
is in them ; but besides being useful in many ways they 
formed an article of food. You pick the head~ of the sun- 
flower and eat the seeds. You bite the seed, spit out the 
husk, and eat the kernel, which, is white and tastes of sun- 
flower. Considerable skill is needed when cracking the husk 
and spitting it out, to leave the kernel intact. This habit was 
universal among the lower classes in Russia. It occupies a 
human being like smoking, and it is a pleasant adjunct to 
contemplation. It is also conducive to untidiness. Nothing 
is so untidy in the world as a room or a platform littered with 
sunflower seeds. All platforms in Russia were thus littered 
at this time of year. When I was on the steamer at Tzaritsin, 



382 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

one of the Cossacks approached me with this question, which 
seemed startling : " Do you chew seeds ? " At first I was at a 
loss to think what he meant, but I soon remembered the sun- 
flower, and when I had answered in the affirmative, he produced 
a great handful of dried seeds and offered them to me. When 
I arrived at my destination, Sosnofka, in the government of 
Tambov, I found the country looking intensely green after a 
wet summer ; the weather was hot, and the nights had the 
softness and the sweetness that should belong to the month 
of June. 

I found a large crowd at the station gathered round a pillar 
of smoke and flame. At first I thought, of course, that a village 
fire was going on. Fires in Russian villages were common 
occurrences in the summer, and this was not surprising, as 
the majority of the houses were thatched with straw. The 
houses were so close one to another, and the ground was 
littered with straw. Moreover, to set fire to one's neighbour's 
house used to be a common form of paying off a score. But it 
was not a fire that was in progress. It was the casting of a bell. 
The ceremony was fixed for four o'clock in the afternoon, with 
due solemnity and with religious rites, and I was invited to be 

present. 

" Heute muss die Glocke werden," 

wrote Schiller in his famous poem, and here the words were 
appropriate. This day the bell was to be. It was a blazing 
hot day. The air was dry, the ground was dry, everything was 
dry, and the great column of smoke mixed with flame issuing 
from the furnace added to the heat. The furnace had been 
made exactly opposite to the church. The church was a 
stone building with a Doric portico, four red columns, a 
white pediment, a circular pale green roof, and a Byzantine 
minaret. The village of Sosnofka had wooden log-built cottages 
thatched with straw dotted over the rolling plain. The plain 
was variegated with woods — oak trees and birch being the 
principal trees — and stretched out infinitely into the blue 
distance. Before the bell was to be cast a Te Deum was to be 
sung. 

It was Wednesday, the day of the bazaar. The bazaar in 
the village of Somotka was the mart, where the buying and 
selling of meat, provisions, fruit, melons, fish, hardware, iron- 
mongery, china, and books were conducted. It happened once 



TRAVEL IN RUSSIA 383 

a, week on Wednesdays, and peasants flocked in from the 
neighbouring villages to buy their provisions. But that 
afternoon the bazaar was deserted. The whole population of 
the village had gathered together on the dry, brown, grassy 
square in front of the church to take part in the ceremony. 
At four o'clock two priests and a deacon, followed by a 
choir (two men in their Sunday clothes), and by bearers of 
gilt banners, walked in procession out of the church. They 
were dressed in stiff robes of green and gold, and as they 
walked they intoned a plain-song. An old card-table, with a 
stained green cloth, was placed and opened on the ground 
opposite, and not far from the church, and on this two lighted 
tapers were set, together with a bowl of holy water. The 
peasants gathered round in a semicircle with bare heads, 
and joined in the service, making many genuflexions and signs 
of the Cross, and joining in the song with their deep bass voices. 
When I said the peasants, I should have said half of them. 
The other half were gathered in a dense crowd round the 
furnace, which was built of bricks, and open on both sides to 
the east and to the west, and fed with wooden fuel. The 
men in charge of the furnace stood on both sides of it and 
•stirred the molten metal it contained with two enormous poles. 
On one side of the furnace a channel had been prepared 
through which the metal was to flow into the cast of 
the bell. The crowd assembled there was already struggling 
to have and to hold a good place for the spectacle of 
the release of the metal when the solemn moment should 
arrive. Three policemen tried to restrain the crowd ; that 
is to say, one police officer, one police sergeant, and one 
common policeman. They were trying with all their might 
to keep back the crowd, so that when the metal was 
released a disaster should not happen ; but their efforts were 
in vain, because the crowd was large, and when they pressed 
oack a small portion of it they made a dent in it which caused 
the remaining part of it to bulge out ; and it was the kind of 
crowd — so intensely typical of Russia — on which no words, 
whether of command, entreaty, or threat, made the smallest 
impression. The only way to keep it back was by pressing on 
it with the body and outstretched arms, and that only kept 
back a tiny portion of it. In the meantime the Te Deum went 
on and on ; and many things and persons were prayed for 



384 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

besides the bell which was about to be born. At one moment 
I obtained a place from which I had a commanding view of 
the furnace, but I was soon oozed out of it by the ever-increasing 
crowd of men, women, and children. 

The whole thing was something between a sacred picture 
and a scene in a Wagner opera. The tall peasants with red 
shirts, long hair, and beards, stirring the furnace with long 
poles, looked like the persons in the epic of the Niebelungen 
as we see it performed on the stage to the strains of a com- 
plicated orchestration. There was Wotan in a blue shirt, with 
a spear ; and Alberic, with a grimy face and a hammer, was 
meddling with the furnace ; and Siegfried, in leather boots 
and sheepskin, was smoking a cigarette and waving an enormous 
hammer ; while Mimi, whining and disagreeable as usual, was 
having his head smacked. On the other hand, the peasants 
who were listening and taking part in the Te Deum, were like 
the figures of a sacred picture — women with red-and-white 
Eastern head-dresses, bearded men listening as though expect- 
ing a miracle, and barefooted children, with straw-coloured 
hair and blue eyes, running about everywhere. Towards six 
o'clock the Te Deum at last came to an end, and the crowd 
moved and swayed around the furnace. The Russian crowd 
reminded me of a large tough sponge. Nothing seemed to 
make any effect on it. It absorbed the newcomers who 
dived into it, and you could pull it this way and press it 
that way, but there it remained ; indissoluble, passive, and 
obstinate. Perhaps the same is true of the Russian nation ; 
I think it is certainly true of the Russian character, in 
which there is so much apparent weakness and softness, 
so much obvious elasticity and malleability, and so much 
hidden passive resistance. 

I asked a peasant who was sitting by a railing under the 
church when the ceremony would begin. " Ask them," he 
answered ; " they will tell you, but they won't tell us." With 
the help of the policeman, I managed to squeeze a way through 
the mass of struggling humanity to a place in the first row. 
I was told that the critical moment was approaching, and was 
asked to throw a piece of silver into the furnace, so that the 
bell might have a tuneful sound. I threw a silver rouble into 
the furnace, and the men who were in charge of the casting 
said that the critical moment had come. On each side of the 



TRAVEL IN RUSSIA 385 

small channel they fixed metal screens and placed a large 
screen facing it. The man in charge said in a loud, matter- 
of-fact tone : " Now, let us pray to God." The peasants 
uncovered themselves and made the sign of the Cross. A 
moment was spent in silent prayer. This prayer was especially 
for the success of the operation which was to take place im- 
mediately, namely, the release of the molten metal. Two 
hours had already been spent in praying for the bell. At this 
moment the excitement of the crowd reached such a pitch 
that they pushed themselves right up to the channel, and the 
efforts of the policemen, who were pouring down with perspira- 
tion, and stretching out in vain their futile arms, like the ghosts 
in Virgil, were pathetic. One man, however, not a police- 
man, waved a big stick and threatened to beat everybody 
back if they did not make way. Then, at last, the culminating 
moment came ; the metal was released, and it poured down 
the narrow channel which had been prepared for it, and over 
which two logs placed crosswise formed an arch, surmounted: 
by a yachting cap, for ornament. A huge yellow sheet of flame 
flared up for a moment in front of the iron screen facing the 
channel. The women in the crowd shrieked. Those who were 
in front made a desperate effort to get back, and those who 
were at the back made a desperate effort to get forward, 
and I was carried right through and beyond the crowd in 
the struggle. 

The bell was born. I hoped the silver rouble which I 
threw into it, and which now formed a part of it, would sweeten 
its utterance, and that it might never have to sound the alarm 
which signifies battle, murder, and sudden death. A vain 
hope — an idle wish. 



25 



CHAPTER XX 
SOUTH RUSSIA, JOURNALISM, LONDON 

IN the autumn of 1907 I went for the first time to South 
Russia. To Kharkov, and then to Gievko, a small 
village in the neighbourhood, where I stayed with Prince 
Mirski in his country house. 

This was the first time I had visited Little Russia, that is 
to say, Southern Russia. The contrast between Central and 
Southern Russia is, I noted at the time, not unlike that 
between Cambridgeshire and South Devon. 

The vegetation was more or less the same in both places, 
and in both places the season was marking the same hour, only 
the hour was being struck in a different manner. In Central 
Russia there was a bite in the morning air, a smell of smoke, 
of damp leaves, of moist brown earth, and a haze hanging 
on the tattered trees, which were generously splashed with 
crimson and gold. In the south of Russia, little green remained 
in the yellow and golden woods ; the landscape was hot and 
dry ; there was no sharpness in the air and no moisture in the 
earth ; summer, instead of being conquered by the sharp wounds 
of the invading cold, was dying like a decadent Roman Emperor 
of excess of splendour, softness, and opulence. The contrast 
in the houses was sharper still. In Central Russia the peasant's 
house is built of logs and roofed with straw or iron according 
to the means of the inhabitant. The villages are brown, colour- 
less, and sullen ; in the South the houses are white or pale 
green ; they have orchards and fruit trees, and sometimes a 
glass verandah. There is something well-to-do and smiling 
about them — something which reminds one of the white- 
washed cottages of South Devon or the farms in Normandy. 

Prince Mirski lived in a long, low house, which gave one the 

impression of a dignified, comfortable, and slightly shabby Grand 

Trianon. The walls were grey, the windows went down to the 

386 



SOUTH RUSSIA, JOURNALISM, LONDON 387 

ground, and opened on to a delightful view. You looked down 
a broad avenue of golden trees, which framed a distant hill 
in front of you, sloping down to a silver sheet of water. In the 
middle of this brown hill there was a church painted white, with 
a cupola and a spire on one side of it, and flanked on both sides 
by two tall cypresses. There were many guests in the house : 
relations, friends, neighbours. We met at luncheon — a large, 
patriarchal meal — and after luncheon, Prince Mirski used to 
play Vindt in the room looking down on to the view I have 
described. Prince Mirski had been Minister of the Interior 
for a short period in the autumn of 1905, and during his 
period of office he had abolished all censorship of newspapers 
previous to their publication. This act, which would not 
seem at first sight to be momentous, had far-reaching effects. 
Never could this censorship be restored again, and its removal 
let in a flood of light to Russian life. It was the opening 
of a small skylight into a darkened room. After that 
nothing could ever be as it had been before. Prince Mirski 
was a warm-hearted, welcoming host, and spoke a beautiful 
easy Russian, and his great, saltlike good sense pervaded the 
light rippling waves, or the lambent shafts of an urbane wit, 
never heavy, never tedious, never lengthy, but always light, 
always amiable, and yet never divorced from a strong funda- 
mental reasonableness. I was taken to see the little Russian 
farms, which were painted green, and were as clean outside as 
they were inside. Inside, the walls were painted red and blue, 
the furniture was neatly arranged, and no hens nor other 
live-stock shared the living-rooms. The inhabitants wore 
no gorgeously picturesque South Russian costumes. There 
were factories in the neighbourhood, and this was perhaps 
the reason an air of Manchester and Birmingham had 
invaded the fashions. The shirt and the collars of the in- 
telligentsia had spread downwards to the peasant population, 
but every now and then one came across a picturesque 
figure. 

One day I met a blind beggar. He was sitting on a hill in 
front of the church, and he was playing an instrument called a 
" lira," that is to say, a lyre. 

It was a wooden instrument shaped exactly like a violin. 
It had three strings, which were tuned with pegs, like those of a 
violin, but it was played by fingering wooden keys, like those of 



388 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

a large concertina, and by, at the same time, turning a handle 
which protruded from the base of the instrument . The musician 
said he could play any kind of music — sad, joyous, and sacred, 
and he gave examples of all three of these styles ; they were to 
my ear indistinguishable in kind ; they seemed to me all tinged 
with the same quick and deliciously plaintive melody ; and the 
sound made by the instrument instantly suggested the melody 
and the accompaniment of Schubert's song : " Der Leiermann " ; 
the plaintive, comfortable noise of the first hurdy-gurdy 
players. I found out afterwards this lyre was indeed the same 
instrument as Schubert must have had in his mind. It was 
the instrument that in Germany is called Leierkasten, in France 
vielle, and in England, hurdy-gurdy ; and my blind beggar was 
just such a man as Schubert's Leiermann. 

After I had stayed some days at Gievko, I went farther 
south to Kiev, and stayed at Smielo with Count Andre Bobrin- 
sky. Count Bobrinsky lived in a compound next to a large 
beet -sugar factory. In the same compound various members 
of the same family lived. Each member of the family had a 
house of his own, and the whole clan were presided over and 
ruled by an old Count Lev Bobrinsky. 

Count Lev Bobrinsky was an old man of astonishing vigour 
and activity, both of body and mind. He knew every detail 
of all the affairs that were going on around him. He was 
afraid of nothing, and once when he was attacked by a huge 
hound he tackled and defeated the infuriated beast with his 
hands, and broke the animal's jaw. 

All his family held him in wholesome respect not unmixed 
with awe. 

One day we went out shooting. Count Lev no longer shot 
himself, but he organised every detail of the day's sport, and 
would come out to luncheon. We drove in a four-in-hand 
harnessed to a light vehicle to the woods, which were most 
beautiful. The trees had huge red stems. We were to shoot 
roebuck with rifles. I was specially told not to shoot a doe. 
While I was waiting there was a rustle in the undergrowth 
and a shout from someone, which meant don't shoot, but which I 
interpreted to mean shoot, and I let off my rifle. It was a doe. 
The whole party were agreed that Count Lev was not to be told. 
In the evening I was taken to his office to see him. It was a 
little pitch-pine house full of rifles, boots and ledgers, and 



SOUTH RUSSIA, JOURNALISM, LONDON 389 

walking-sticks. He seemed to have about a hundred walking- 
sticks and two hundred pairs of boots. He went over the events 
of the day. With me was one of the neighbours, who had 
also been one of the guns, a Prince Yashville. 

Count Lev went through the bag and the number of shots 
fired, and just when he was going to ask me if I had fired, Prince 
Yashville intervened, and said that I had not had a shot, and I 
by my silence gave consent to this statement. The next day 
I left for the north, but on the following Sunday, the whole clan 
of Bobrinsky family used to meet at tea, and when Count Lev 
came in the first thing he said was : " It is an odd thing that 
people can't tell the truth. Mr. Baring said he had not had a 
shot out shooting, and one of the barrels of his gun was dirty." 
Then it was explained to him that I had shot at a doe. 
I felt I could never go back there again. 
Near Smielo there was a village which was almost entirely 
inhabited by Jews. 

It was from this village, one day, that two Jews came to 
Countess Bobrinsky and asked if they might store their fur- 
niture and their books in her stables . . . they would not 
take up much room. When Countess Bobrinsky asked them 
why, they said a pogrom had been arranged for the next day. 
Countess Bobrinsky was bewildered, and asked them what they 
meant, and who was going to make this pogrom. The two 
Jews said : They were coming from Kiev by train, and from 
another town. The pogrom would take place in the morning 
and they would go back in the evening. 

When she asked : " Who are they ? " she could get no answer, 
except that some said it was the Tsar's orders, some that it 
was the Governor's orders, but they had been sent to make a 
/ igrom. 

Countess Bobrinsky told them to go to the police, but the 
Jews said it could not be prevented, and that all had been 
arranged for the morrow. Both Count and Countess Bobrinsky 
then made inquiries, but all the answer that they could get was 
that a pogrom had been arranged for the next day. It was not 
the people of the place who would make it ; these lived in 
peace with the Jews. They would come by the night train 
from two neighbouring towns ; they would arrive in the morn- 
ing ; there would be a pogrom, and then they would go away, 
and all the next morning carts would arrive from the neigh- 



390 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

bouring villages, just as when there was a fair, to take away 
what was left after the pogrom. When they asked who was 
sending the pogrom-makers they could get no answer. Count 
Bobrinsky interviewed the local police sergeant, but all he did 
was to shrug his shoulders and wring his hands, and ask what 
could two policemen do against a multitude ? if there was to 
be a pogrom, there would be a pogrom. He could do nothing ; 
nothing could be done ; nobody could do anything. 

The next morning the peasant cook, a woman, came into 
Countess Bobrinsky 's room, and said : " There will be no 
pogrom after all. It has been put off." 

I stayed in Russia all that autumn and winter, and I saw 
the opening of the third Duma, and arrived in London in the 
middle of December. I was no longer correspondent in St. 
Petersburg, but I worked in London at journalism, and in the 
summer of 1908, together with Hilary Belloc, I edited and 
printed a newspaper, which had only one number, called The 
North Street Gazette. The newspaper was printed at a press 
which we had bought and established in my house, No. 6 North 
Street — a picturesque house behind the other houses in North 
Street, which possessed a courtyard, a fig-tree, and an under- 
ground passage leading to Westminster Abbey. 

The newspaper was written entirely by Belloc, myself, and 
Raymond Asquith, who wrote the correspondence. 

It was to be supported by subscribers. We received quite 
a number of subscriptions, but we never brought out a second 
number, and we returned the cheques to the subscribers. 

The North Street Gazette had the following epigraph : " Out, 
out, brief scandal ! " and opened with the following statement of 
aims and policy : 

" The North Street Gazette is a journal written for 
the rich by the poor. 

"The North Street Gazette will be printed and 
published by the proprietors at and from 6 North Street, 
Smith Square, Westminster, London, S.W. This, the 
first number, appears upon the date which it bears ; sub- 
sequent numbers will appear whenever the proprietors 
are in possession of sufficient matter, literary and artistic, 
or even advertisement, to fill its columns. No price is 
attached to the sheet, but a subscription of one guinea 
will entitle a subscriber to receive no less than twenty 
copies, each differing from the last. These twenty copies 



SOUTH RUSSIA, JOURNALISM, LONDON 391 

delivered, none will be sent to any subscriber until his next 
subscription is paid. 

" The North Street Gazette will fearlessly expose 
all public scandals save those which happen to be lucrative 
to the proprietors, or whose exposure might in some way 
damage them or their more intimate friends. 

" The services of a competent artist have been pro- 
visionally acquired, a staff of prose writers, limited but 
efficient, is at the service of the paper ; three poets of 
fecundity and skill have also been hired. Specimens of 
all three classes of work will be discovered in this initial 
number. 

" A speciality of the newspaper will be that the Russian 
correspondence will be written in Russian, and the English 
in English. 

" All communications (which should be written on one 
side of the paper only) will be received with consideration, 
and those accompanied by stamps will be confiscated." 

Then followed a leading article composed entirely of cliches ; 
a long article advocating votes for monkeys, written by Belloc 
and afterwards republished by him ; " Society Notes " ; a " City 
Letter " ; and a poem by Belloc, called " East and West," parts 
of which, but not the whole of it, are to be found in his book 
The Four Men. 

The version I print here is the original form of this spirited 

lyric : 

"EAST AND WEST 

" The dog is a faithful, intelligent friend, 
But his hide is covered with hair. 
The cat will inhabit a house to the end, 
But her hide is covered with hair. 

The camel excels in a number of ways, 
The Arab accords him continual praise, 
He can go without drinking for several days — 
But his hide is covered with hair. 

Chorus : 
Oh ! I thank my God for this at the least, 
I was born in the west and not in the east ! 
And he made me a human instead of a beast : 
Whose Hide is Covered with Hair. 

The cow in the pasture that chews the cud, 

Her hide is covered with hair, 
And even a horse of the Barbary blood 

His hide is covered with hair. 



392 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

The hide of the mammoth is covered with wool, 
The hide of the porpoise is sleek and cool, 
But you find if you look at that gambolling fool — 
That his hide is covered with hair. 

The lion is full of legitimate pride, 

But his hide is covered with hair ; 
The poodle is perfect except for his hide 

(Which is partially covered with hair). 

When I come to consider the Barbary ape, 
Or the African lynx, which is found at the Cape. 
Or the tiger, in spite of his elegant shape, 
His hide is covered with hair. 

The men that sit on the Treasury Bench, 
Their hide is covered with hair, 
Etc. etc. etc. 

Chorus : 
Oh ! I thank my God for this at the least, 
I was born in the west and not in the east ! 
And he made me a human instead of a beast : 
Whose Hide is Covered with Hair." 

Then came a city letter, an account of a debate in the 
House of Lords, and some book reviews. 
This was the review of Hamlet : 

" The number of writers who aspire to poetic drama 
is becoming legion ; Mr. William Shakespeare's effort — not 
his first attempt in that kind — is better in some ways than 
in some others which we recently noticed. We regret, 
therefore, all the more that the dominant motive of his 
drama makes it impossible for us to deal with it. 

" Mr. Shakespeare has taken his subject from the 
history of Denmark, and in his play King Claudius is 
represented as murdering his brother and marrying Queen 
Gertrude, his deceased brother's wife. There was a King 
Claude (whether there has been an intentional change 
of name we do not know) who succeeded his brother Olaf II. 
We hear a good deal about him, his parentage, and life at 
court. That he was intemperate and hasty — he was 
known to exceed at meals, and on one occasion he boxed 
the Lord Chamberlain's ears — need hardly be said. But 
there is nowhere we can discover a hint of the monstrous 
wickedness Mr. Shakespeare has attributed to him. Were 
this vile relationship {i.e. the King's marriage with his 
murdered brother's wife) a fact, it might fairly be a theme 



SOUTH RUSSIA, JOURNALISM, LONDON 393 

for the dramatist to deal with ; but we repeat we certainly 
do not care to criticise the drama in which it is treated. 

" We regret this, because we see unmistakable signs 
of power in Mr. Shakespeare's verse. He has a real instinct 
for blank verse of the robustious kind, and the true lyric 
cry is to be found in the songs of his play, although they 
are too often marred by deplorable touches of coarseness. 

" He will, we suppose, regard us as fusty old-fashioned 
critics for the line we have taken ; but, trusting to the 
promise which we think we discern in Mr. Shakespeare, 
it is by no means unlikely that in ten years' time he will 
be the first to regret his extravagance and to applaud 
•our disapproval. 

" At any rate, although we must speak frankly of such 
a plot as Hamlet, we have not the slightest desire wholly 
to condemn Mr. Shakespeare as a poet because he has 
written a play on an unpleasant theme. 

" If he turns his undoubted poetic gifts to what is sane 
and manly we shall be the first to welcome him among 
the freemasonry of poets. At the same time we should 
like to remind him that speeches do not make a play, 
and that his dialogue, halting somewhere between what 
is readable and what is actable, loses the amplitude of 
narrative without achieving the force of drama." 

The newspaper ended with a sonnet written in the House 
•of Commons by Belloc, and by a correspondence column 
written by Raymond Asquith — both of which items I trans- 
cribe. This correspondence is, I think, the most brilliant of 
Raymond Asquith's ephemera. 

"SONNET WRITTEN IN DEJECTION IN THE HOUSE OF 
COMMONS. 
" Good God, the boredom ! Oh, my Lord in Heaven, 
Strong Lord of Life, the nothingness and void 
Of Percy Gattock, Henry Murgatroyed, 
Lord Arthur Fenton, and Sir Philip Bevan, 

And Mr. Palace ! It is nearly seven ; 

My head's a buzz, my soul is clammed and cloyed, 
My stomach's sick and all myself's annoyed 

Nor any breath of truth such lees to leaven. 

No question, issue, principle, or right ; 
No wit, no argument, nor no disdain : 
No hearty quarrel : morning, noon, and night 

The old, dead, vulgar fossil drags its train ; 

The while three journalists and twenty Jews 
Do with the country anything they choose." 



394 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

" To the Editor of The North Street Gazette 
Mr. Gladstone's Diction 

" Sir, — Mr. Tollemache's letter (in which he shows that 
Mr. Gladstone invented the phrase ' bag and baggage ') 
has suggested to me the following reminiscences. I was 
the humble means of bringing together Mr. Gladstone and 
the. late Mr. Cheadle ffrench (at a breakfast -party which 
I gave at Frascati's in 1876). I remember that Mr. 
Gladstone turned to me towards the close of the meal, and 
remarked in his always impressive manner, ' We shall hear 
more of that young man.' The prediction was never 
fulfilled (though Mr. ffrench was about to become a J. P. 
when he died so suddenly two years ago), but the anecdote 
is worthy of record as illustrating the origin of another 
phrase which has since passed into popular parlance. On 
a different occasion I recollect Mr. Gladstone (who was a 
good French scholar) employing the (now familiar) expres- 
sion ' Dieu et Mon Droit.' I also had the honour to be 
present when Mazzini altered the famous epigram (after- 
wards remembered and quoted against him) ' non vero 
ma ben trovato.' I remember too the pleasure which was 
caused by another gentleman present (who shall be name- 
less) neatly capping it with the expression ' Trocadero.' 
But those were indeed ' noctes cenesque deum ! ' I re- 
collect telling this story to Jowett. He replied by asking 
me in his curious high voice whether I had read his 
translation of Thucydides. I confessed somewhat shame- 
facedly that I had not, and I remember that he made no 
reply at all (either then or afterwards), but remained 
perfectly silent for three days (from Saturday to Monday). 
It was characteristic of the man. — Yours, etc., 

" Lionel Bellmash. 

" (All this is very interesting, and proves what we have 
always asserted, that wit as well as honesty and logic is 
on the side of the Free Trader. — Editor, The North Street 
Gazette.)" 

" Coincidences 

" Sir, — The following may not be without interest 
to those of your readers who care for natural history. 
Yesterday as I was walking home from the city, I noticed 
a large flock of flamingoes (Phcenicoptenes ingens) hover- 
ing over Shaftesbury Avenue. This was at 6.17 p.m. 
On reaching home I went up to dress to my own room, 
which communicates with my wife's by a stained oak 



SOUTH RUSSIA, JOURNALISM, LONDON 395 

door. Judge of my surprise to find it tenanted by a 
giraffe (Tragelaphus Asiaticus). Surely the coincidence 
is a remarkable one. 

" The only analogy which occurs to me at this 
moment (and that an imperfect one) is a story which 
my father used to tell, of how he was one day driving 
down Threadneedle Street and observed a middle-aged 
man of foreign appearance standing under a lamp-post 
and apparently engaged in threading a needle ! On inquiry 
he discovered that the man's name was Street ! — Yours, 

etc., FOXHUNTER. 

" P.S. — It is only fair to mention that the man was not 
really threading a needle, but, as it afterwards turned 
out, playing upon a barrel-organ. My father's mistake 
was due to his defective vision. But this does not affect 
the point of the story. 

" (Our correspondent's letter is both frank and 
manly ; and we shall be interested to know whether 
any of our other readers have had similar experiences.) " 

The North Street Gazette died after its first number, but 
it was perhaps the indirect begetter of another newspaper, 
that had a longer life, The Eye Witness, which in its turn begat 
The New Witness. 

The Eye Witness was edited at first by Belloc, and then 
by Cecil Chesterton. Cecil Chesterton edited The New Witness 
until he went as a private soldier to France to fight in the 
war and to die. The editorship was then taken over by his 
brother Gilbert. 

During the next years, until the outbreak of the war, my life 
was divided between journalistic work in London and long 
sojourns in Russia ; while I was in Russia I wrote books on 
Russian matters, literary and political. During this period 
I went twice to Turkey — once for the Morning Post, to see the 
Turkish Revolution in May 1909 ; and once for the Times, to 
try and see something of the Balkan War in 1912. Early in 
1912 I went round the world. On three separate occasions 
I went for a cruise in a man-of-war. One of these cruises — in 
December 1908, when I went as the guest of Commander Fisher 
on board the Indomitable — lasted for several weeks, and I was 
privileged during this visit to see a sight of thrilling interest — 
gun-layer's test and battle practice in Aranci Bay. 

On the eve of Candlemas 1909, I was received into the 



396 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Catholic Church by Father Sebastian Bowden at the Brompton 
Oratory : the only action in my life which I am quite certain 
I have never regretted. Father Sebastian began life as an 
officer in the Scots Guards. He had served as A.D.C. under 
the same chief and at the same time as my uncle, Lord Cromer. 
He lived all his life at the Oratory and died in 1920. He was 
fond even in old age of riding about London on a cob. His 
face was stamped with the victory of character over all other 
elements. He was a sensible Conservative, a patriot, a fine 
example of an English gentleman in mind and appearance ; 
a prince of courtesy, and a saint ; and I regard my acquaint- 
ance with him and the friendship and sympathy he gave me 
as the greatest privilege bestowed on me by Providence. 



CHAPTER XXI 

CONSTANTINOPLE 

(1909) 

I ARRIVED at Constantinople in May 1909, on the same 
day that the Sultan Abdul Hamid left the city. A 
revolution had just occurred. The Young Turk party 
had dethroned the Sultan. The revolution was a military 
one. 

When I arrived, the surface life of Constantinople was 
unchanged. The only traces of the crisis were a few marks, and 
some slight damage done by shells and bullets on the walls 
of the houses. The streets were crowded with soldiers. The 
tram-cars and the cabs were full of dusty men, stained with the 
marks of campaigning : Albanians with rifles slung across their 
shoulders, Macedonian gendarmes in light blue uniforms. The 
mosques were crowded with soldiers. Shots were sometimes 
heard, but none of the soldiery except the marines gave 
any trouble. 

I lived at the Little Club at Pera. My bedroom looked 
out on to the Golden Horn. In the foreground were dark 
cypresses. Across the water I could see Stamboul, soft as a 
soap-bubble in the haze, milky-white and filmy with a hundred 
faint rainbow hues. The Club was a centre of gossip and mild 
gambling. Enver Pasha used to frequent it, and one evening 
a man called Assiz Bey walked in to play cards, with a piece 
of a rope which had just served to hang a man. 

I attended the Selamlik of the new Sultan. It was a casual 
ceremony. Most of the troops were drawn up in places where 
it was impossible for the Sultan to pass, and up to the last 
all were in doubt as to what the Sultan's route would be. At 
the last minute the whole cortege was stopped by a large 
hay wagon which leisurely took its way along the road which 
had been cleared for the Sultan. In Stamboul the brightest 



398 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

of crowds swarmed — men and women of every colour, dressed 
in all colours, chirruping like sparrows, hanging out of 
wooden balconies beside broken Byzantine arches, where one 
caught sight of trailing wistaria and sometimes of a Judas tree 
in blossom. The Sultan had no military escort and only one 
sais, dressed in blue and gold, as an outrider. There was no 
pomp about the ceremony, which passed off well. The Turkish 
Parliament was sitting not a stone's throw from St. Sophia, 
and not far from the site where Justinian's Palace once stood. 
The crowd wandered and lolled about, smoking cigarettes by 
the gates of the Parliament ; the fickle, opportunist, supple- 
minded, picturesque crowd of Stamboul, was, I think, akin to 
that which fought for the "Blues" or the "Greens" in the 
days of Justinian and Theodora. 

One night, I was invited to meet the leading men of the 
Young Turk party, Talaat Bey and others. They all drank 
water at the meal, but before the meal began, we were all 
offered a stiff glass of whisky to show that the new Government 
had discarded the old-fashioned Mohammedan principles. But 
though the hosts drank the whisky they did not appear to 
enjoy it. 

Life, and the heat at Constantinople, and the atmosphere 
of the place, sapped one's energy. The manifold activities 
of the human machine seemed to exhaust themselves in the 
acts of drinking coffee and in having one's boots cleaned. You 
had your boots finished off out of doors after they had been 
preliminarily cleaned indoors. You sat on a chair and a man 
in a shirt and a fez, rubbed them, waxed them, greased them, 
kneaded them with his bare hand, brushed them, dusted them, 
polished them with a silk handkerchief, and painted the edges 
of them with a spirit. And during this process you looked on 
at the shifting crowd, sipped your coffee, and thought long 
thoughts which led nowhere. 

One morning streams of people were walking briskly from 
Pera to Stamboul, in the same direction. They were making 
for the Galata Bridge, for there was news in the air that they 
had been hanging some Turkish Danny Deevers in the morning. 
Nobody quite knew whether they had been hanged yet or not. 
Some people said they had been hanged at dawn ; others, that 
they were about to be hanged ; others, that they had just 
been hanged. They had, as a matter of fact, been hanged at 



CONSTANTINOPLE 399 

dawn : three of them at the end of the bridge, three of them 
opposite St. Sophia, four, I think, opposite the House of Parlia- 
ment, and three somewhere else — making thirteen in all. They 
were soldiers, and one of them was an officer. They were 
hanged for having taken part in a recent mutiny in the cause 
of Abdul Hamid, and for having murdered some men. 

As you walked farther along the bridge the crowd grew 
denser, and right at the end of the bridge it was a seething mass, 
kept back by soldiers from the actual spot where the victims 
were hanging — the crowd, not a London-like crowd, all drab 
and grey, but a living kaleidoscope of startling colours — the 
colours of tulips and Turkey carpets and poppy-fields, red, 
blue, and yellow. The gallows, which were in line along the 
side of the street beyond the bridge, were primitive tripods of 
wood. Each victim was strung up by a rope fixed to a pulley. 
The men were hanged by being made to stand on a low chair. 
The chair was kicked away and the sharp jerk killed them. 
They were hanging not far above the ground. They were each 
covered by a white gown, and to the breast of each one his 
sentence was affixed, written in Turkish letters. They looked 
neither like felons nor like murderers, but rather like happy 
martyrs (in a sacred picture), calm, with an inscrutable content. 
I had but a glimpse of them, and then I was carried away 
by the swaying crowd, which soldiers were prodding with the 
butts of their rifles. The dead soldiers were to hang there all 
day. I did not go any farther. 

As I was trying to make my way back through the crowd, a 
Hodja (a Moslem priest) passed, and he was roughly handled 
by the soldiers, and given a few sharp blows in the back with 
their rifles. I heard fragments of conversation, English and 
French. Some people were saying that the exhibition would 
have a satisfactory effect on the populace. I saw a Kurd, a 
fierce-looking man who was gnashing his teeth — not at the 
victims, to be sure, but at the sight of three Moslems who had 
died for their faith, and for having defended it against those 
who they were told were its enemies, being made into a 
spectacle after their death for the unbeliever and the alien. 

The following afternoon I was wandering about the streets 
of Stamboul when, amongst the indolent crowd, I noticed 
several men who were peculiar. Firstly, they were walking 
in a hurry. Secondly, they were dressed like Russians, 



400 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

in long, grey, shabby redingotes, what the Russians call 
padevki, and their hair, allowed to grow long, was closely 
cropped at the ends just over the neck, where it hung in a 
bunch. They wore high boots. I knew they were Russians, 
and paid but little attention to them, since Constantinople 
is not a place, like London, where the appearance of an 
obvious foreigner is a remarkable sight. But I met an English 
friend, who said : " Have you seen the Russian pilgrims ? " 
This led me to run after them. I soon caught them up, for 
they were delayed under an arch by some soldiers who were 
escorting some prisoners (soldiers also). 

" Are you Russian ? " I asked one of the pilgrims — a tall, 
fair man. 

" Yes," he answered ; "lam from Russia." 

" You are a pilgrim ? " 

" Yes ; I come from Jerusalem." 

The man was walking in a great hurry, and by this time we 
had reached the Galata Bridge. 

" Who were those men the soldiers were leading ? " the 
pilgrim asked me. 

" Those were prisoners — soldiers who mutinied." 

Here two others, a grey-bearded man, and a little, dark 
man, joined in ; the grey-bearded man had a medicine bottle 
sticking out of his coat pocket. I am certain it contained an 
intoxicating spirit. 

" Some soldiers were hanged here," I added. 

" Where ? " said the man. 

" There," I answered, showing him the exact spot. " They 
stayed there all day." 

" For all the people to see," said the pilgrim, much im- 
pressed. " Why were they hanged ? " 

" They mutinied." 

" Ah, just like in our own country ! " said the pilgrim. 

" But," joined in the dark man, " have not you sent away 
your Gosudar ? " (Sovereign). 

"lam not from here ; I am an Englishman." 

" Ah, but did the people here send away their Gosudar ? " 

"They did." 

" And was it done," asked the grey-haired pilgrim, " with 
God favouring and assisting (Po Bozhetnu) or not ? " 

I hesitated. The brown man thought I did not understand. 



CONSTANTINOPLE 401 

" Was it right or wrong ? " he asked. 

" They said," I answered, " that their Sultan had not kept 
his word ; that he had given a ' Duma ' and was acting against 
it." 

" Ah ! " said the brown -haired man. " So now they have 
a ' Duma ' ! " 

" Yes," I said ; " they have liberty now." 

" Ah ! Liberty ! Eh ! Eh ! Eh ! " said the grey-haired 
man, and he chuckled to himself. Oh, the scepticism of that 
chuckle ! — as much as to say, we know what that means. 

" And you have a Sovereign ? " asked the brown -haired 
man. 

" Yes ; we have a King." 

" But your Queen, who was so old, and ruled everybody » 
she is dead." 

" Yes ; she is dead." 

" Ah, she was wise, very wise ! " (mudraya). 

We had now crossed the bridge. The pilgrims had hastened 
on to their steamer, which was alongside the quay. They 
were going back to Russia. But one of them lagged behind 
and almost bought a suit of clothes. I say almost, because it 
happened like this : A clothes -seller — Greek, or Armenian, or 
Heaven knows what ! — was carrying a large heap of clothes : 
striped trousers, black waistcoats, and blue serge coats. The 
brown pilgrim chose a suit. The seller asked five roubles. The 
pilgrim offered three. All the steps of the bargain were gone 
through at an incredible speed, because the pilgrim was in a 
great hurry. The seller asked him among other things if he 
would like my blue serge jacket. The pilgrim said certainly 
not ; it was not good enough. Finally, after looking at all the 
clothes and trying on one coat, which was two sizes too small, 
he made his choice and offered three roubles and a half. The 
bargain was just going to be closed when the pilgrim suddenly 
said the stuff was bad and went away as fast as he could, bidding 
me good-bye. He was a native of Voronezh. 

After a short spell of cold weather the spring came back once 
more and opened " her young adventurous arms " to greet the 
day of the " Coronation " of the new Sultan. There was that 
peculiar mixture of warmth and freshness in the air, that in- 
toxicating sweetness, which you only get in the South; and 
after a recent rainfall the green foliage in which the red-tiled 
26 



402 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

houses of the city are embedded, like red bricks in moss, 
gleamed with a new freshness. The streets were early crowded 
with people eager to make their way towards Eyoub, to the 
mosque where the Sultan is invested with the Sword of Osman. 

I drove with Aubrey Herbert across the old bridge 
into the straggling Jewish quarter on the other side of the 
Golden Horn. The houses there are square and wooden, 
rickety and crooked, top-heavy, bending over the narrow street 
as though they were going to fall down, squalid, dirty, dusty, 
and rotten ; they are old, and sometimes you come across a 
stone house with half-obliterated remains of beautiful Byzan- 
tine window arches and designs. Every now and then you got 
glimpses of side streets as steep as Devonshire lanes and as 
narrow as London slums, with wistaria in flower trailing across 
the street from roof to roof. All along the road people were at 
their doorsteps, and people and carriages were moving in the 
direction of Eyoub. After a time, progress, which up to then 
had been easy and rapid, came to a dead stop, and the coachman 
who was driving Herbert and myself dived into a side lane and 
^began driving in the opposite direction, back, as it seemed, 
towards Constantinople. Then he all at once took a turning 
to the right, and we began to climb a steep and stony track 
until we reached the walls of Constantinople. These walls, 
which were built, I believe, by the Emperor Theodosius, are 
enormously thick and broad. As we reached them, people 
were climbing up on to the top of them. 

Soon we came to a crowd, which was being kept back 
by soldiers, and the intervention of an officer was necessary 
to let us drive through the Adrianople Gate into the road 
along which the Sultan was to pass on his way back to Con- 
stantinople after the ceremony. We drove through the gate, 
right on to the route of the procession, which was stony, rough, 
and steep. We were at the top of a high hill. To the right of 
us were the huge broad walls, as thick as the towers of our 
English castles, grassy on the top, and dotted with a thick 
crowd of men dressed in colours as bright as the plumage of 
tropical birds. At this moment, as I write, the colour of one 
woman's dress flashes before me — a brilliant cerulean, bright 
as the back of a kingfisher, gleaming in the sun like a jewel. 
To the left was a vista of trees, delicate spring foliage, cypresses, 
mosques, green slopes, and blue hills. Both sides of the road 



CONSTANTINOPLE 403 

were lined with a many-coloured crowd — some sitting on chairs, 
some in tents, some on primitive wooden stands. Lines of 
soldiers kept the people back. The road itself was narrow. 
It was a crowd of poor people, but it was none the less 
picturesque on that account. Vendors of lemonade and water- 
carriers walked up and down in front of the people. Some 
of the spectators hung small carpets from their seats. The 
tents varied in size and quality, some boasting of magnificent 
embroideries and others were such as gipsies pitch near a 
race-course. We drove on and on through this double line 
of coloured people and troops, down the narrow cobbled way, 
until we reached the level, and there, after a time, we were 
obliged to leave the carriage and go on foot. • 

The makeshift stands, the extemporary decorations, the 
untidy crowd, proved that in the East no elaboration and no 
complicated arrangements are necessary to make a pageant. 
Nature and the people provide colours more gorgeous than 
any wealth of panoplies, banners, and gems could display, and 
the people seem to be part of nature herself and to share her 
brightness. 

We walked through a cordon of cavalry until we reached 
the mosque of Eyoub. The Sultan had already arrived and his 
carriage was waiting at the gate. The carriages of other digni- 
taries were standing in a side street. A small street of wooden 
houses led up to the mosque. We were beckoned to the 
ground floor of one of these houses by a brown personage in a 
yellow turban. We were shown on to a small platform divided 
into two tiers, crowded with Turkish men and women ; others 
were standing on the floor. Some of the spectators were 
officers ; some wore uniform ; among those on the lower tier 
were some soldiers, a policeman, and a postman. We were 
welcomed with great courtesy and given seats. But whenever 
we asked questions, every question — no matter what it was 
about — was taken to mean that we were anxious to know when 
the Sultan was coming. And to every question the same 
answer was made gently by these kind and courteous people, 
as though they were dealing with children : " Have patience, 
my lamb, the Sultan will soon be here." 

Immediately in front of us stood the large French barouche 
of the Sultan, drawn by four bay horses, the carriage glittering 
with gilding and lined with satin. W T e waited about an hour, 



404 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

the people every now and then continuing to reassure us that 
the Sultan would soon be there. Then we heard the band. 
Two men spread a small carpet on the steps of the carriage, into 
which the Sultan immediately stepped, and drove off, headed 
by a sais dressed in blue and gold and mounted on a bay horse. 

As this large gilded barouche passed, with the Sultan in 
uniform inside it, the spirit of the Second Empire seemed for 
one moment to hover in the air, and I half expected the band 
to play : 

" Voici le sabre, le sabre, le sabre, 
Voici le sabre, le sabre de mon pere," 

which, as far as the words go, would have been appropriate, 
as the Sultan had just been girded with the sword of his 
predecessors. This sudden ghost of the Second Empire con- 
trasted sharply with the spectators with whom I was standing. 
They belonged to the Arabian Nights, to infinitely old and 
far-off things, like the Old Testament. They became solemn 
when the Sultan passed, and murmured words of blessing. 
But there was no outward show of enthusiasm and no cheering 
nor even clapping. 

I wondered whether the ghost of the Second Empire, which 
had seemed to be present, were an omen or not, and whether 
the ceremony which marked the inauguration, not only of a 
new reign but also of a new regime — a totally different order of 
things, a fresh era and epoch — were destined to see its hope 
fulfilled, or whether under the gaiety and careless lightness 
it was in reality something terribly solemn and fatal of quite 
another kind, namely, the funeral procession of the Ottoman 
Empire. 

Towards the end of my stay I was taken by the British 
Ambassador and Lady Lowther in their yacht to Brusa, where 
we spent three nights. Brusa in spring is one of the most lovely 
places in the world. It is nested high on a hill, which you 
reach after a long drive from the coast, and before you towers 
Mount Olympus. Brusa is a place of roses and streams and 
elegant mosques, and baths built of seaweed-coloured marbles. 
The cool rivulets flow down the hill like the little streams 
described by Dante : 

" Li ruscelletti che de' verdi colli 
Del Cascentin discendon giuso in Arno, 
Facendo i lor canali e freddi e molli," 



CONSTANTINOPLE 405 

The water of the springs and streams at Brusa seemed to have 
a secret freshness of their own. The roses were in full bloom ; 
nightingales sang all day ; and the cool sound of running water 
was always in one's ears. 

I left Constantinople in the middle of June, convinced of 
one thing, that the new Turkish regime was not unlike the 
old one, and that what a man who had lived for years in Con- 
stantinople had told me was true. When I had mentioned the 
Young Turks to him, he said : " Qui sont les jeunes Turcs ? 
II n'y a que les Turcs." 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE BALKAN WAR, 1912 

" f~~\N arrive novice a toutes les guerres," wrote the French 
I I philosopher ; or if he did not, he said something 
like it. I have never known a place where being 
on the spot made so sharp a difference in one's point of 
view as the Near East, and where one's ignorance, and the 
ignorance of the great mass of one's fellow-countrymen, was so 
keenly brought home to one. The change in the point of view 
happened with surprising abruptness the moment one crossed 
the Austrian frontier. There are other changes of a physical 
nature which happen as well when one crosses the frontier 
into any kingdom where war is taking place. The whole of 
the superficial luxuries of civilisation seem to disappear in a 
twinkling ; and so adaptable a creature is man that you feel 
no surprise ; you just accept everything as if things had always 
been so. The trains crawl ; they stop at every station ; you 
no longer complain of the inadequacy of the luxuries of your 
sleeping-car ; you are thankful to have a seat at all. It is no 
longer a question of criticising the quality of the dinner or the 
swiftness of the service. It is a question whether you will get 
a piece of bread or a glass of water during the next twenty- 
four hours. 

Belgrade Station was full of reservists and peasants : men 
in uniform, men half in uniform, men in the clothes of the 
mountains — sheepskin coats, putties, and shoes made of twisted 
straw ; dark, swarthy, sunburnt and wind-tanned, hard men, 
carrying rifles and a quantity of bundles and filling the cattle 
vans to overflowing. At every station we passed trains, most 
of them empty, which were coming back to fetch supplies of 
meat. Every platform and every station were crowded with 
men in uniforms of every description. A Servian officer got 

into the carriage in which I was travelling. He was dressed in 

406 



THE BALKAN WAR, 1912 407 

khaki. He wore a white chrysanthemum in his cap, a bunch 
of Michaelmas daisies in his belt, and he carried, besides his 
rifle and a khaki bag which had been taken from the Turks, a 
small umbrella. He had been wounded in the foot at Kuman- 
ovo. He was on his way to Uskub. He was a man of commerce, 
and had closed his establishment to go to the war ; the majority 5 ' 
of the officers in his regiment were men of commerce he 
said. They had sacrificed everything to go to the war, and 
that was one reason why they were not going to allow the 
gains of the war, which they declared were a matter of life 
and death to their country, to be snatched from them by 
diplomatists at a green table. " If they want to take from 
us what we have won by the sword," he said, " let them take 
it by the sword." 

I asked him about the fighting at Kumanovo. He said the 
Turks had fought like heroes, but that they were miserably 
led. He then began to describe the horrors of the war in the 
Servian language. As I understood about one word in fifty, 
I lost the thread of the discourse, and so I lured him back into 
a more neutral language. He told me that someone had asked 
a Turkish prisoner how it came about that the Turks, whom all 
the world knew to be such brave soldiers, were nevertheless 
always beaten. The Turk, after the habit of his race, answered 
by an apologue as follows : " A certain man," he said, "once 
possessed a number of camels and an ass. He was a hard 
taskmaster to the camels, and he worked them to the uttermost ; 
and after trading for many years in different lands, he became 
exceedingly rich. At last one day he himself fell sick ; and 
feeling that his end was drawing nigh, he wished to relieve 
himself of the burden on his soul, so he had bade the camels 
draw near to him, and he addressed them thus : ' I am dying, 
camels, dying, only I have most uncivilly kept death waiting, 
until I have unburdened my soul to you. Camels, I have done 
you a grievous wrong. When you were hungry, I stinted you 
of food, when you were thirsty, I denied you drink, and 
when you were weary, I urged you on and denied you rest ; 
and ever and always I denied you the full share of your fair 
and just wage. Now I am dying, and all this lies heavily 
on my soul, I crave your forgiveness, so that I may die in 
peace. Can you forgive me, camels, for all the wrong I have 
done you ? ' The camels withdrew to talk it over. After 



408 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

a while the Head Camel returned and spoke to the merchant 
thus : ' That you ever overworked us, we forgive you ; that 
you underfed us, we forgive you ; that you never remembered 
to pay us our full wage, we forgive you ; but that you always 
let the ass go first, Allah may forgive you, but we never can ! '" 
It took over twelve hours to get from Belgrade to the 
junction of Nish, where there was a prospect of food. When 
we stopped at one station in the twilight there was a great 
noise of cheering from another train, and a dense crowd of 
soldiers and women throwing flowers. Then in the midst of 
the clamour and the murmur somebody played a tune on a 
pipe. A little Slav tune written in a scale which has a 
technical name — let us say the Phrygian mode — a plaintive, 
piping tune, as melancholy as the cry of a seabird. The 
very voice of exile. I recognised the tune at once. It is 
in the first ten pages of Balakirev's collection of Russian folk- 
songs under the name " Rekrutskaya " — that is to say, recruits' 
song. Plaintive, melancholy, quaint, and piping, it has no 
heartache in it ; it is the luxury of grief, the expression of idle 
tears, the conventional sorrow of the recruit who is leaving 
his home. 

" You are going far away, far away from poor Jeannette, 
And there's no one left to love me now, and you will soon forget." 

So, in the song of our grandfathers which I have quoted 
earlier in the book, the maiden sang to the conscript, adding 
that were she King of France, " or, still better, Pope of 
Rome," she would abolish war, and consequently the parting 
of lovers. But the song of the Slav recruit in its piping notes 
seems to say : "I am going far away, but I am not really 
sorry to go. They will be glad to get rid of me at home, and 
I, in the barracks, shall have meat to eat twice a day, and jolly 
comrades, and I shall see the big town and find a new love as 
good as my true love. They will mend my broken heart there ; 
but in the meantime let me make the most of the situation. 
Let me collect money and get drunk, and let me sing my sad 
songs, songs of parting and exile, and let me enjoy the melan- 
choly situation to the full." 

That is what the wistful, piping song, played on a wooden 
flageolet of some kind, seemed to say. It just pierced through 
the noise and then stopped ; a touching interlude, like the 



THE BALKAN WAR, 1912 409 

shepherd's piping amidst the weariness, the fever and the fret, 
the delirious remembrance and the agonised expectation, of 
the last act of Wagner's Tristan und Isolda. The train moved 
on into the gathering darkness. 

We arrived at Nish at eight o'clock in the evening. It 
was dark ; the station was sparsely lighted ; the buffet, to 
which we had been looking forward all day, was as crowded as 
a sardine-box and apparently devoid of anything suggesting 
food. Wounded soldiers, reservists, officers filled the waiting- 
room and the platform. The Servian officer dived into the 
crowd and returned presently, bringing his sheaves with him 
in the shape of three plates of hot chicken. 

Nish seemed an unfit-like meeting-place for triumphant 
soldiers ; it resembled rather the scene of a conspiracy in 
a melodrama, where tired conspirators were plotting nothing 
at all. One felt cut off from all news. In London, one 
knew, in every sitting-room people were marking off the move- 
ments of the battles with paper flags on inaccurate maps. 
Here at Nish, in the middle of a crowd of men who either had 
fought or were going to fight, one knew less about the war than 
in Fleet Street. One bought a newspaper, but it dealt with 
everything except war news. 

A man came into the refreshment -room — the name was in 
this case ironical — and said, " I have had nothing to eat, not a 
piece of bread and not a drop of water, for twenty-four hours," 
and then, before anybody could suggest a remedy — for food 
there was none — he went away. Afterwards I saw him with 
a chicken in his hand. One man was carrying a small live 
pig, which squealed. In the corner of the platform two men, 
with crutches and bandages, dressed in the clothes of the 
country, were sitting down, looking as if they were tired of 
life. I offered them a piece of cold sausage, which they 
were too tired to refuse ; only at the sight of a cigarette one of 
them made a gesture, and, being given one, smoked and smoked 
and smoked. I knew the feeling. Suddenly, in the darkness, a 
sleeping-car appeared, to the intense surprise of everyone — an 
International sleeping-car, with sheets, and plenty of room in 
it. My travelling companion and myself started for Sofia, 
where we arrived the next morning. 

At Sofia the scene on the platform was different. The place 
was full of bustle ; the platform crowded with Red Cross 



410 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

men, nurses, and soldiers, in tidy, practical uniforms. The 
refreshment -room, too, was crowded with doctors. You heard 
fragments of many languages : the scene might have been 
Mukden, 1904, or, indeed, any railway station in any war any- 
where. An exceedingly capable porter got me my luggage 
with dispatch, and I drove to the hotel in a " phaeton," but 
not with the coursers of the sun. The horses here had all gone 
to the war. At the hotel I was first given — the only room said 
to be vacant — a room which was an annex to the cafe. For 
furniture it had six old card-tables and nothing else. 

Full of Manchurian memories, I was about to think this 
luxurious, when the offending Adam in me quite suddenly 
revolted, and I demanded and obtained instead a luxurious 
upper chamber. I stayed about a week at Sofia, and made 
unavailing efforts to get to the front. I was then told I 
would find it easier to get to the front where the Servian 
Army was fighting. So, laden with papers and passports, I 
started for Uskub. 

I travelled from Sofia to Nish in the still existing comfortable 
sleeping-cars ; but when I arrived once more at the junction 
of Nish I learnt a lesson which I thought I had mastered many 
years ago, and that is, take in a war as much luggage as you 
possibly can to your civilised base, but once you start for the 
front or anywhere near it, take nothing at all except a tea- 
basket and a small bottle of brandy. I had only a small trunk 
with me, but the stationmaster refused to let it proceed. War 
goes to the heads of stationmasters like wine. This particular 
stationmaster had no right whatsoever to stop my small trunk 
on the grounds that it was full of contraband goods, and he 
could perfectly well have had it examined then and there ; 
instead of which he said it would have to be taken to the Custom 
House Office in the town, which would involve a journey of two 
hours and the missing of my train. I was obliged to leave my 
trunk at the station, nor cast one longing, lingering look behind. 
The only reason I mention this episode, which has no sort of 
interest in itself, is to illustrate something which I will come to 
later. At Nish I got into a slow train. The railway carriage 
was full of people. There was in it a Servian poet, who had 
temporarily exchanged the lyre for the lancet, and enrolled 
himself in the Medical Service. His name was Dr. Milan Curcin 
— pronounced Churchin. He showed me the utmost kindness. 



THE BALKAN WAR, 1912 411 

Like all modern poets, he was intensely practical, and an admir- 
able man of business, and he promised to get me back my trunk 
and either to bring it to Uskub himself, as he was continually 
travelling backwards and forwards between Uskub and Nish, 
or to have it sent wherever I wished. He spoke several 
languages, and we discussed the war. He said the Servians 
resented the abuse which had been levelled against them by 
Pierre Loti. Pierre Loti, he said, accused them of being 
barbarians and of attacking Turkey without reason. 

" We," said the poet, " hate war as much as anyone. 
What does Pierre Loti know of our history ? What does 
he know of Turkish rule in Servia ? He knows Stamboul ; 
'but what does he know of Turkey who only Stamboul 
knows ? ' Besides, if Pierre Loti's knowledge of Turkey was 
anything like his knowledge of Japan, as reflected in that 
pretty book called Madame Chrysantheme — a book which 
made all serious scholars of Japan rabid with rage — it is 
not worth much." He had no wish to deny the Turks 
their qualities. That was not the point. The point was 
Turkish rule in Servia in the past, and that was unspeak- 
able. The poet was obliged to get out at the first station we 
stopped at, and after his departure I moved into another com- 
partment, in which there were a wounded soldier, a young 
Russian volunteer, who was studying at the Military Academy 
at Moscow, two men of business who were now soldiers, and a 
gendarme who had been standing up all night, and who stood 
up all day. I offered these people some tea, having a tea- 
basket with me. They accepted it gratefully, and after a little 
time one of them asked me if I were an Austrian. I said no ; 
I was an Englishman. They said : " We thought it extremely 
odd that an Austrian should offer us tea." The wounded 
soldier, thinking I was a doctor, asked me if I could do any- 
thing to his wound. As he spoke Servian I could only under- 
stand a little of what he said. It seemed heart-breaking, just 
as one began to get on more or less in Bulgarian, to have to 
shift one's language to one which, although the same in essentials, 
is superficially utterly different in accent, intonation, and in 
most of the common words of everyday life ! Servian and 
Bulgarian are the same language at root, but Servian is more 
like Polish, Bulgarian more like Russian. Servian is a great 
literary language, with a mass of poetry and a beautiful store 



412 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

i » 
of folk songs and folk epics. Bulgarian compared with it is 
more or less of a patois ; it is like Russian with all the inflections 
left out. With the help of the Russian student I gathered that 
the soldier had been wounded at the battle of Kumanovo, 
that his wound had been dressed and bandaged by a doctor, 
but that subsequently he had gone to a wise woman, who had 
put some balm on it, and that the effect of the balm had 
been disastrous. I strongly recommended him to consult 
a doctor on the first possible occasion. It is travelling under 
such circumstances, in war-time especially, that one really gets 
beneath the crust of a country. Every man who travels in 
an International sleeping-car becomes more or less inter- 
national ; and it is not in hotels or embassies that you get face 
to face with a people, however excellent your recommendations. 
But travel third-class in a full railway carriage, in times of war, 
and you get to the heart of the country through which you are 
travelling. The qualities of the people are stripped naked — 
their good qualities and their bad qualities ; and this is why I 
mentioned the episode of the trunk, in order to call attention 
to the extreme kindness shown to me by the Servian poet, Dr. 
Curcin, who rescued the trunk for me at great personal incon- 
venience. I hoped that the " Georgian " poets would do the 
same for a Servian war correspondent, supposing there were 
a war in England and they were to come across one. 

After many hours we came to a stop where it was necessary 
to change, at Vranja ; and then began one of those long war 
waits which are so exasperating. The station was full to over- 
flowing with troops ; there was no room to sit down in the 
waiting-room. We waited there for two hours, and then, at 
last, the train was formed which was bound for Uskub. There 
were several members of the Servian Parliament who had 
reserved places in this train, and in a moment, it appeared to 
be quite full, and there seemed to be no chance of getting a 
place in it. I was handicapped also by carrying a saddle and 
a bridle, which blocked up the narrow corridor of the railway 
carriage. But I got a place in the train, and room was found 
for the saddle owing to the kindness of an aviator called 
Alexander Maritch. He was one of those extremely unselfish 
people who seem to spend their life in doing nothing but 
extremely tiresome things for other people. He carried my 
saddle in his hands for half an hour, and at last managed to 



THE BALKAN WAR, 1912 413 

find room for it where it would not be in the way of all the 
other passengers. He was an astonishingly capable man with 
his hands and his fingers. There appeared to be nothing he 
could not do. He uncoupled the railway carriages ; he mended 
during the journey a quantity of broken objects, and he spent 
the whole of the time in making himself useful in one way or 
another. 

Towards nightfall we arrived at the station of Kumanovo, 
and got out to have a look at the battlefield. It was quite 
dark and the ground was covered with snow. Drawn up near 
the station were a lot of guns and ammunition carts which 
had been taken from the Turks. Here were some Maxim guns 
whose screens were perforated by balls, which shows that they 
could not have been made of good material ; and indeed 
at Uskub I was told that there were no doubt cases where 
the Turkish material was bad ; but another and more potent 
cause of the disorganisation in the Turkish Army was the 
manner in which the Turks handled, or rather mishandled, 
their weapons. They forgot to unscrew the shells ; they jammed 
the rifles. This is not surprising to anyone who has ever seen 
a Turk handle an umbrella. He carries it straight in front of 
him, pointing towards him in the air, if it is shut, and sideways 
and beyond his head, if it is open. 

We arrived at Uskub about half -past eight. The snow 
was thawing. The aspect was desolate. The aviator found me 
a room in the Hotel de la Liberte ; but the window in it was 
broken, and there was no fuel. It was as damp as a vault. 
We had dinner. I happened to mention that it would be nice 
to smoke a cigarette, but I had not got any more. At once the 
aviator darted out of the room and disappeared. " He won't 
come back," said one of his friends, " till he has found you some 
cigarettes, you may be sure of that." In an hour's time he 
returned with three cigarettes, having scoured the town for 
them, the shops, of course, being shut. 

Uskub is a picturesque, straggling place, and at that time 
of the year, swamped as it was in melting snow, an incredibly 
dirty place, situated between a mountain and the river Vardar. 
Like all Turkish towns, it is ill-paved, or rather not paved at 
all, and full of mud. It is— or was— largely inhabited by 
Albanian Mohammedans. As the headquarters of the Servian 
Army, it was full of officers and soldiers ; there was not much 



414 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

food, and still less wood. Here were the war correspondents. 
They had not been allowed to go any farther ; but the order 
went out that they could, if they liked, go on to Kuprulu, a 
little farther down the line, whence it was impossible to tele- 
graph. A stay at Uskub, as it was then, would afford a tourist 
a taste of all the discomforts of war without any of its excite- 
ment. The principal distraction of the people at Uskub was 
having their boots cleaned ; and as the streets were full of 
large lakes of water and high mounds of slush, the effect of the 
cleaning was not permanent. Matthew Arnold was once asked 
to walk home after dinner on a wet night in London. " No," 
he said ; " I can't get my feet wet. It would spoil my style." 
Matthew Arnold's style would have been annihilated at Uskub. 

The stories told by eye-witnesses of the events immediately 
preceding the occupation of Uskub by the Serbians were tragi- 
comic in a high degree. In the first place, the population of 
the place never for one moment thought that the Turks could 
possibly be beaten by the Servians. Suddenly, in the midst 
of their serene confidence, came the cry : " The Giaours are 
upon us." Every Turkish official and officer in the place lost 
his head, with the exception of the Vali (head of the district), 
who was the only man possessing an active mind. Otherwise 
the Turkish officers fled to the Consulates and took refuge 
there, trembling and quaking with terror. 

The two problems which called for immediate solution were : 
(a) to prevent further fighting taking place in the town ; (b) 
to prevent a general massacre of the Christians before the 
Servians entered the town. To prevent fighting in the town, 
the Turkish troops had to be persuaded to get out of it. This 
was done. The only hope of solving both these problems lay 
in the Vali. All the Consuls, as I said, agreed that the Vali's 
conduct on this occasion shone amidst the encircling cowardice 
of the other officers and officials. Already before the news of the 
battle of Kumanovo had reached the town about two hundred 
Christians had been arrested on suspicion and put in prison. They 
were not of the criminal class, but just ordinary people — priests, 
shopmen, and women. About three hundred Mohammedans 
were already in the prison. News came to the Russian Consul- 
General, M. Kalnikoff, that these prisoners had had nothing to 
eat for two days. He went at once to the prison and demanded 
to be let in. He heard shots being fired inside. Some of the 



THE BALKAN WAR, 1912 415 

Albanians were firing into the air. He asked the Governor of 
the prison whether it was true that the prisoners had had no 
food for two days, and the Governor said it was perfectly true, 
and that the reason was that there was no bread to be had in 
the town. 

" In that case," said the Consul-Gen eral, " you must let 
all these prisoners out." 

" But if I let them out," said the Governor, "the Moham- 
medans will kill the Christians." 

Finally it was settled that the prisoners should be let out 
a few at a time, the Christians first, and the Mohammedans 
afterwards, through a hedge of soldiers ; and this was accom- 
plished successfully. M. Kalnikoff told me that among the 
prisoners were many people he knew. 

Then came the question of giving up the town to the Servians 
without incurring a massacre. I am not certain of the chrono- 
logy of the events, and all this was told me in one hurried and 
interrupted interview, but the Vali took the matter in hand, 
and as he was driving to the Russian Consulate a man in the 
•crowd shot him through the arm and killed the coachman. 
This man was said to be mad. 

In the meantime, the various Consulates were crowded with 
refugees, and in the French Consulate a Turkish officer fainted 
from apprehension, and another officer insisted on disguising 
himself as a kavass. The Servians, who were outside the city, 
at some considerable distance, thought that the Turks meant 
to offer further resistance in the town. 

It was arranged that the various Consuls and the Vali (in 
their uniforms) should set out for the Servian headquarters and 
deliver up the town. This was done. They drove out until 
they met Servian troops. Then they were blindfolded and 
marched between a cordon of soldiers through the deep mud 
until they reached those in authority. They explained matters, 
and the Servian cavalry rode into the town, just in time to 
prevent a massacre of the Christian population. As it was, 
ihe Albanians had already done a good deal of looting. That 
there was no fighting in the town, and consequently no mas- 
sacre, was probably due to the prompt action of the Vali. 

When the Turkish and Albanian soldiers retired south from 
Kumanovo they were apparently completely panic-stricken. 
At Uskub, horses belonging to batteries were put in trains, while 



416 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

the guns were left behind. There is not the slightest doubt that 
the troops massacred any Christians they came across. At the 
military hospital at Nish I saw a woman who was terribly cut 
and mutilated. She told the following story : Her house, in 
which were her husband, her brother, his son-in-law, and her 
two sons, was suddenly occupied by Arnaut refugees. These 
were Albanians from the north, who were fighting with the 
Turks. The Arnauts demanded weapons, which they were 
given. They then set fire to the house, killed the woman's 
husband and everyone else who was there, and no doubt thought 
that they had killed her also. But she was found still breathing, 
and taken to the hospital. The doctor said that she might 
recover. Stories such as these, and far worse, one heard on all 
sides. The Arnauts were an absolutely uncompromising people. 
They gave and expected no quarter. In the hospitals they 
bit the doctors who tried to help them. They fought and struck 
as long as there was a breath left in their bodies. 

At the military hospital of Nish I saw many of the 
wounded. The wounds inflicted by bullets were clean, and 
the doctors said that they were such that the wounded either 
recovered and were up and about in a week, or else they died. 
There were cases of tetanus, and I saw many men who had 
received severe bayonet wounds and fractures at the battle of 
Perlepe, where some of the severest fighting had taken place. 

At the beginning of this battle somebody on the Servian 
side must have blundered. A regiment was advancing, expect- 
ing to meet reinforcements on both sides. In front of them, on 
a hill, they saw what they took to be their own men, and halted. 
Immediately a hot fire rained on them from all sides. The 
men they had seen were not their own men but Turks. The 
Servians had to get away as fast as ever they could go, otherwise 
they would have been surrounded ; as it was, they incurred 
severe losses. 

You had only to be a day in Servia to realise the spirit of the 
people. They were full of a concentrated fire of patriotism. 
The war to them was a matter of life and death. They 
regarded their access to the sea as a question of life and death 
to their country. They had been the driving power in the war. 
They had had to make the greater sacrifices ; and the part 
they had played certainly was neither realised nor appreci- 
ated. The Servians were less reserved than the Bulgarians, 



THE BALKAN WAR, 1912 417 

but they had the same singleness of purpose and the same 
power of cleaving fast to one great idea. 

I only spent four or five days at Uskub, and as there seemed 
to be no chance of getting within range of any fighting, I 
went back to Sofia. I stopped on the way to Nish, where I 
visited the military hospital, and there I met once more the 
Servian poet, and received my lost trunk from his hands. Just 
outside the Servian hospital there was a small church. This 
church was originally a monument built by the Turks to 
celebrate the taking of Nish, and its architecture was designed 
to discourage the Servians from ever rising against them 
again, for the walls were made almost entirely of the skulls 
of massacred Servians. 



27 



CHAPTER XXIII 

CONSTANTINOPLE ONCE MORE 

(1912) 

AS soon as I got back to Sofia I found that there would be 
nothing of interest for me to do or see there, and no 
chance of getting to the Bulgarian front. I might 
perhaps have got to Headquarters, but that would have been 
of little use, and the Times, for whom I was writing, already 
had one correspondent with the Bulgarian army. So I settled 
to go to Constantinople via Bucharest. 

I spent a night at Bucharest, and I arrived at Constantinople 
on a drizzly, damp, autumn day in November. 

Many people have recorded the melancholy they have 
felt on arriving at Constantinople for the first time, especi- 
ally in the autumn, under a grey sky, when the kaleidoscopic, 
opalescent city loses its radiance, suffers eclipse, and seems 
to wallow in greyness, sadness, dirt, and squalor. A man 
arriving at Constantinople on November 19, 1912, would have 
received this melancholy impression at its very intensest. The 
skies were grey, the air was damp, and the streets looked 
more than usually squalid and dishevelled. But in addition to 
this, there was in the air a feeling of great gloom, which was 
intensified by the chattering crowds in Pera, laughing and 
making fun of the Turkish reverses, by the chirping women at 
the balconies, watching the stragglers and the wounded coming 
back from the front, and listening, in case they might hear the 
enemy, sullenly firing. In the city you felt that every Turk, 
sublimely resigned as ever, and superficially, at least, utterly 
expressionless and indifferent as usual, was walking about with 
a heavy heart, and probably every thinking Turk was feeling 
bitterly that the disasters which had come were due to the 
criminal folly of a band of alien and childishly incompetent 

political quacks. You felt also above everything else the 

418 



CONSTANTINOPLE ONCE MORE 419 

invincible atmosphere of Byzantium, which sooner or later 
conquers and disintegrates its conquerors, however robust 
and however virile. Byzantium, having disintegrated two great 
Empires, seemed to be ironically waiting for a new prey. One 
remembered Bismarck's saying that he could wish no greater 
misfortune to a country than the possession of Constanti- 
nople. 

But so quick are the changes there, so chameleon-like is the 
place, that all this was already out of date two days later. In 
three days the mood of the city completely changed : people 
began to talk of the enemy being driven right back to Sofia ; 
the feast of Bairam was celebrated ; the streets were decked 
with flags ; the men-of-war were dressed ; and, in the soft 
autumnal sunshine, the city glowed once more in its etheral 
coat of many colours. 

The stories of the cholera, people said, had been grossly 
exaggerated ; 8000 Bulgarians had been taken prisoners (800 
was the subsequent figure, some people said three, some 
people said one). Cholera was raging in the enemy's lines. New 
troops were pouring in. The main enemy would be repulsed ; 
the others would be dealt with piecemeal, " as before " ; in 
fact, everything was said to be going well. 

But I saw a thing with my eyes, and which threw some light 
on the conditions under which the war was being carried on. 
One morning I drove out in a motor-car with two companions 
and a Turkish officer, with the intention of reaching the Tchat- 
aldja lines. Until that day people had been able to reach the 
lines in motor-cars. Probably too many people had done this ; 
and most properly an order had been issued to put a stop to the 
flood of visitors. In spite of the presence of a Turkish officer 
with us we could not get beyond the village of Kutchuk Tchek- 
medche, which is right on the Sea of Marmora. Not far from 
the village, and separated from it by a small river, is a railway 
station, and as we drove past the bank of the railway line we 
noticed several dead men lying on the bank. The station was 
being disinfected. We stopped by the sandy beach to have 
luncheon, and before we had finished a cart passed us with more 
dead in it. We drove back through San Stefano. We entered 
through a gate and drove down the suburb, where, bounded on 
one side by a railway embankment, and on the other hand by a 
wall, there was a large empty space intersected by the road. 



420 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

Beyond this were the houses of San Stefano. It was in this 
space that we were met by the most gruesome and terrible sight 
I have ever seen ; worse than any battlefield or the sight of 
wounded men. This plot of ground was littered with dead and 
dying men. The ground itself was strewn with rags, rubbish, 
and filth of every kind, and everywhere, under the wall, on the 
grass, by the edge of the road, and on the road, were men in 
every phase and stage of cholera. 

There was nobody to help them ; nobody to look after them ; 
nothing to be done for them. Many of them were dead, and 
lay like terrible black waxworks in contorted shapes. Others 
were moving and struggling, and others again were just gasping 
out the last flicker of life. One man was making a last effort to 
grasp a gourd. And in the middle of this there were other 
soldiers, sitting patiently waiting and eating bread under the 
walls of the houses. There was not a sound, not a murmur. 
Imagine a crowd of holiday-makers at Hampstead Heath 
suddenly stricken by plague, and you will have some idea of 
this terrible sight. Imagine one of Gustave Dore's illustra- 
tions to Dante's " Inferno " made into a tableau vivant by some 
unscrupulous and decadent artist. Imagine the woodcuts in 
old Bibles of the Children of Israel stricken in the desert and 
uplifting their helpless hands to the Brazen Serpent. Deserted, 
helpless, and hopeless, this mass of men lay like a heap of half- 
crushed worms, to suffer and to die amidst indescribable filth, 
and this only seven miles from the capital, where the nurses 
were not allowed to get patients ! Soon after I saw this grisly 
sight I met Mr. Philip, First Secretary of the U.S.A. Embassy, 
at the Club. He told me he had been to San Stefano, and that 
he and a U.S.A. doctor, Major Ford, were trying to do something 
to relieve the people who were suffering from cholera. Would 
I come and help them ? 

The next day I went to San Stefano. 

San Stefano is a small suburb of Constantinople whose 
name, as we all know, has been written in history. Possibly 
some day Clapham Junction will be equally famous if there is 
ever a Treaty of Clapham, subsequently ratified by the Powers 
at a Congress of Constantinople or Delhi. It contains a number 
of elegant whitewashed and two-storied houses, inhabited by 
the well-to-do of Constantinople during the summer months. 
San Stefano — why or how I know not — became during the war 



CONSTANTINOPLE ONCE MORE 421 

one of the smaller centres of the sick — in other words, a cholera 
camp. 

San Stefano, at the time of my visit, was entirely deserted ; 
the elegant summer " residences " empty. The streets were 
silent. You could reach San Stefano from Constantinople 
either by steamer, which took a little over an hour and a half ; 
or by train, which took an hour (but there were practically no 
trains running) ; or in a carriage, which took two hours and 
a half. The whole place was lifeless. Only on the quay, 
porters and Red Crescent orderlies dealt with great bales of 
baggage, and every now and then in the silent street you heard 
the tinkling, stale music of a faded pianoforte which played an 
old-fashioned — not an old — tune. I wondered, when I heard 
this music, who in the world could be playing the pianoforte in 
San Stefano at such a moment. I need hardly say that the 
effect was not only melancholy but uncanny ; for what is 
there sadder in the world than out-of-date music played on 
an exhausted and wheezy instrument ? 

At the quay a line of houses fronted the sea. You then 
turned up a muddy side street and you came to a small square, 
where there were a few shops and a few cafes. In the cafes, 
which were owned by Greeks, people were drinking coffee. 
The shops were trading in articles which they have brought from 
the bazaars and which they thought might be of use to the 
cholera patients. A little farther on, beyond the muddy square, 
where a quantity of horses, donkeys, and mules were tethered 
to the leafless trees, you came to a slight eminence surrounded 
by walls and railings. Within these walls there was a small 
building made of stucco, Grecian in style. It was the deserted 
Greek school. This is the place where cholera patients at last 
found shelter, and this is the place which I was brought to 
by Major Ford, U.S.A., and Mr. Philip, who both of them 
went to San Stefano every day. 

It was at San Stefano that under the outside wall of the town, 
and on the railway embankment, the dead and dying were lying 
like crushed insects, without shelter, without food, without 
water. Miss Alt, a Swiss lady of over seventy, and a friend of 
hers, an Austrian lady, Madame Schneider, heard of this state 
of things and seeing that nothing was being done for these 
people, and that no medical or other assistance was allowed 
to be brought them, took the matter into their own hands 



422 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

and started a relief fund with a sum of £4,. and did what they 
could for the sick. They turned the deserted Greek school 
into a hospital, and they were joined by Mr. Frew, a Scotch 
minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in Constantinople. 
Funds were then supplied them by the British and American 
Embassies, and Major Ford and Mr. Philip joined these two 
ladies and Mr. Frew. 

The first day I went there, no other medical helpers except 
these volunteers had a Turkish sergeant ; but the day after, a 
Turkish medical officer arrived, and the whole matter was 
nominally under his charge. The medical work of the place 
was undertaken by Major Ford, and the commissariat was 
managed by Mr. Frew. There were in the Greek school nine 
rooms altogether. Of these six were occupied by patients, 
one formed a kind of kitchen and store-room, and two of the 
rooms were taken over by the medical staff of the Turkish Red 
Crescent. Besides this there was a compound roofed over in the 
open air, and there were a certain number of tents — a dozen or 
so. In this house, and in these tents there were at first thrown 
together over 350 men, all in various stages of sickness. Some 
of them were in the last stage of cholera ; some of them had 
dysentery ; some of them had typhus ; some were suffering 
from exhaustion and starvation, and the greater part of them 
were sick. 

At first there was some doubt whether the disease was 
cholera. The disease which was manifest — and terribly mani- 
fest — did not include all the best -known symptoms of cholera. 
It was plain also that a great number of the soldiers were 
suffering simply from exhaustion, exposure, and starvation. 
But later on medical diagnosis was made, and the cholera 
microbe was discovered. A German cholera specialist who 
came from Berlin, Dr. Geissler, told me that there was no 
doubt of the existence of the cholera microbe. Besides which, 
some of the symptoms were startlingly different from those 
of mere dysentery. From the human point of view, and not 
from the scientific point of view, the question was indifferent. 
The solemn fact from the human point of view was that the 
Turkish soldiers at San Stefano were sick and dying from a 
disease that in any case in many points resembled cholera, and 
that others were dying from what was indistinguishable from 
cholera in its outward manifestations. Every day and every 



CONSTANTINOPLE ONCE MORE 423 

night so many soldiers died, but less and less as the days went 
on. One night thirty died ; another night fifteen ; another 
night ten ; and so on. 

I have called the Greek school a hospital, but when you 
think of a hospital you call up the vision of all the luxuty of 
modern science — of clean beds, of white sheets, of deft and 
skilful nurses, of supplies of sterilised water, antiseptics, 
lemonade, baths, quiet, space, and fresh and clean air. Here 
there were no such appliances, and no such things. There 
were no beds ; there were mattresses on the dusty and dirty 
floors. The rooms were crowded to overflowing. There was 
no means of washing or dressing the patients. It is difficult 
to convey to those who never saw it the impression made by 
the first sight of the rooms in the Greek school where the sick 
were lying. Some of the details are too horrible to write. It 
is enough to say that during the first few days after the sick 
were put into the Greek school, the rooms were packed and 
crowded with human beings, some of them in agony and all of 
them in extreme distress. They lay on the floor in rows along 
the walls, with flies buzzing round them ; and between these 
rows of men there was a third row along the middle of the room. 
They lay across the doors, so that anybody opening a door in 
a hurry and walking carelessly into the room trod on a sick 
man. They were weak from starvation. They were one and 
all of them parched, groaning and moaning, with a torturing 
and unquenchable thirst. They were suffering from many 
other diseases besides cholera. One man had got mumps. 
Many of the soldiers had gangrened feet and legs, all blue, stiff 
and rotten, as if they had been frost-bitten. These soldiers 
had either to have their limbs amputated or to die — and there is 
no future for an amputated Turk. There is nothing for him to 
do save to beg. Some of them had swellings and sores and holes 
in their limbs and in their faces, and although most of them 
were wounded, all of them were unwashed and many of them 
covered with vermin. Most of them besides their overcoats 
and their puttees had practically no clothes at all. Their 
underclothes were in rags, and caked with dirt. The sick were 
all soldiers ; most of them were Turks ; some of them were 
Greeks. 

In such a . place any complicated nursing was out of the 
question. The main duties of those who attempted to relieve 



424 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

the sick consisted in bringing warm clothes and covering to those 
who were in rags and shivering ; soup to those who were faint 
and exhausted, and water to those who were crying for it ; and 
during the first few days at San Stefano all the sick were crying 
for water, and crying for it all day and all night long. You 
could not go into any of the rooms without hearing a piteous 
chorus of " Doctor Effendi, Doctor Bey, sou, sou " (sou is the 
Turkish for water). Luckily the water supply was good. 
There was a clean spring not far from the school, and water 
mixed with disinfectant could be given to the sick. The sick 
and the well at first were crowded together absolutely indis- 
criminately. A man who had nothing the matter with him 
besides hunger and faintness would be next to a man who was 
already rigid and turning grey in the last comatose stage of 
cholera. 

During the first week of this desperate state of things Miss 
Alt and Madame Schneider worked like slaves. They spent the 
whole day, and very often the whole night, in bringing clothes 
to the ragged, food to the hungry, and water to the thirsty. 
Mr. Frew managed the whole commissariat and the food supply, 
and he managed it with positive genius. He smoothed over 
difficulties, he razed obstacles, and in all the creaking joints 
of the difficult machinery he poured the inestimable oil of his 
cheerfulness, his good-humour, and his kindness. Major Ford 
acted with an equal energy in taking over the medical side of 
the school and in sorting from the heaped-up sick those who 
were less ill, and separating them from those who were danger- 
ously ill ; and in this task he had the help of Mr. Philip. 
This sounds a simple thing to say. It was in practice and in fact 
incredibly difficult. During the first days there were scarcely 
any orderlies at all and few soldiers, and it was a desperately 
slow and difficult task to get people carried from one place to 
another. One afternoon, which I shall never forget as long as 
I live, Major Ford undertook in one of the crowded rooms to 
shift temporarily all the sick from one side of the room to the 
other side of it, and while they were there to lay down a 
clean piece of oilcloth. This was immensely difficult. The 
patients, of course, were unwilling to move. First of all it had 
to be explained to them that the thing was not a game, and that 
it would be to their ultimate advantage ; and then they had to 
be bribed from one side of the room to the other with baits 



CONSTANTINOPLE ONCE MORE 425 

of lemons and cigarettes. Nevertheless, Major Ford managed 
to do it and get down a clean piece of oilcloth. When one 
had spent the whole day in this place, and one had seen people 
like Miss Alt, Madame Schneider, Major Ford, and Mr. Frew 
working like slaves from morning till night, one still had the 
feeling nothing had been done at all compared with what 
remained undone, so overwhelming were the odds. And yet at 
the end of one week there was a vast change for the better in 
the whole situation. 

Great as was the distress of the wretched victims, they were 
sublime in their resignation. They consented, like Job, in 
what was worse than dust and ashes, to the working of the 
Divine will. They most of them had military water-bottles ; 
they used to implore to have these bottles filled ; and when 
they were filled — thirsty as they were — they would not drink 
all the water, but they kept a little back in order to perform 
the ablutions which the Mohammedan religion ordains should 
accompany the prayers of the faithful. Even in their agonjr 
the Turks never lost one particle of their dignity, and never 
for one moment forgot their perfect manners. They died as 
they lived — like the Nature's noblemen they are — always 
acknowledging every assistance ; and when they refused a 
gift or an offer they put into the refusal the graciousness of 
an acceptance. 

Only those who have been to Turkey can have any idea of 
the politeness, the innate politesse du cceur, of the Turk. One 
day when I was coming back from San Stefano on board a Turkish 
Government launch, and together with an English officer I was 
talking to the Turkish naval officer who was in command of 
the launch, the Englishman offered a cigarette to the Turkish 
officer. He accepted it and lit it. The Englishman then 
offered one to the officer's younger brother, who was there also. 
"' He does not smoke," said the officer. Then he added, after 
a pause, " I do not either." " He has lit and smoked the 
cigarette so as not to offend me," said the Englishman aside 
to me. This is typical of the land of politeness the Turks 
show. Equally polite were the soldiers who were dying of a 
horrible disease amidst awful conditions. They never forgot 
their manners. They were childlike and infinitely pathetic 
in their wants. One man in a tent where some of the con- 
valescent were assembled cried out in Turkish his need — which 



426 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

was interpreted to me by a Greek. He wanted a candle, by 
which a man, he said, might tell stories to the others ; for, he 
added, it was impossible for a story-teller to tell stories in the 
dark ; the audience could not see his face. There was no candle 
in the place, but I am not ashamed to say that I stole a small 
lamp and gave it to this man to afford illumination to that 
story-telling. Another man wanted a lemon. There were 
then no lemons. The man produced a five-piastre piece (a 
franc, nearly a shilling). This was a large fortune to him, but 
he offered it to me if I could get him a lemon. One soldier 
refused either to eat or to drink. He would not touch either 
soup or milk or water or sour milk, which was the favourite 
dish of the soldiers there, and which, being a national dish of 
Turkey, could be supplied to them in great quantities. He 
kept on reiterating one word. It turned out to mean prune 
soup. He was hankering after prune soup. He wanted prune 
soup and nothing else. Another man wanted a pencil above 
all things, which was duly given him. 

The gratitude of these poor people to anyone who did any 
little thing for them was immense. " Allah will restore to you 
everything you have done for us a hundredfold," they would 
say. Or again : " You are more than a doctor to us ; you are 
a friend." One day Mr. Philip brought some flowers to the 
sick soldiers. Their delight knew no bounds. The Turks 
love flowers. They treasured them. They even sacrificed 
their water-bottles — and every drop of water was precious 
to them — to keep the flowers fresh a little longer. 

The curious resignation of the Turkish character used often 
to be manifest in a striking way, in little matters. Here is 
an instance which struck me. When lemons or cigarettes, or 
indeed anything else, were distributed to the patients, one 
cigarette or one lemon, as the case might be, was given to 
each man all round the room. Sometimes a patient would ask 
for two, and his demand used to arouse the indignation of his 
fellow-patients, which they often expressed in violent terms. 
Nevertheless, he would persist in his demand, and would keep 
on saying : " Give me two, Doctor, give me two " ; and finally 
one of the Turkish orderlies present would nod his head and 
say : " Yes, give him two " ; and then he would be given two, 
and the other patients, instead of grumbling, would acquiesce 
in the fait accompli and say: " Yes, yes, give him two." It 



CONSTANTINOPLE ONCE MORE 427 

was curious that they never dreamt of all of them asking for 
two of any one thing ; but the importunate were acknowledged 
to be privileged, if they were sufficiently importunate. One 
morning, when lemons were being distributed to the soldiers, 
each man receiving a lemon apiece, one, who like the rest 
wore a fez, said in a whisper to the distributor : " S<W (iol Svo 
€t/Aat Xpurriavos (" Give me two. I am a Christian "). There 
were several Greeks among the sick, and I regret to say that 
when they were given shirts they frequently sold them to their 
neighbours, and then appeared naked the next day and asked for 
another. 

Miss Alt's plan was to give to all who asked — the undeserving 
as well as the deserving — and the plan worked out quite well 
in the long run, for, as she said, they were none of them too 
well off. 

After the first few days the Turkish medical authorities 
took steps in the matter of the Greek school. During the 
first week of the work there, a British unit of the Turkish Red 
Crescent arrived from England under the sound direction of Dr. 
Baines, and a further recruit joined the helpers in the person 
of Lady Westmacott, who brought with her an energetic, clever 
and untiring Russian doctor. Although it was impossible 
to persuade any of the owners of the houses at San Stefano 
to allow them to be used as hospitals, a house was found for 
Dr. Baines' unit. He soon set up a lot of tents, withdrew 
from the overcrowded school a number of- the patients, and 
was able to do excellent work. But he received this house for 
himself and his staff on the express condition that no sick of 
any kind whatsoever, and not even the owner's father, should 
be allowed to go into it. Later on, a unit of the Egyptian 
Red Crescent arrived, with a staff of German doctors and an 
Englishman. Wooden barracks were built for them in the plain 
outside the Greek school, fronting the sea. 

Hard words were said about the Turkish medical auth- 
orities with regard to this matter ; and it is, of course, easy 
for people who know nothing about the local conditions 
and the local difficulties to pass sweeping judgments. On 
the whole, I was told by competent authorities, the Turkish 
Red Crescent did exceedingly well in dealing with the wounded 
and the sick in the large field of their operations. But an 
epidemic of cholera such as that which I have described seemed 



428 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

to paralyse them. It took the Turks unprepared. Steps were 
taken, but tardily ; and to Western minds the procedure seemed 
incredibly and criminally slow ; yet in the East it is impossible 
to do things in a hurry, and if you try to hustle, you will find that 
there will be less speed in the long run. If you consider all 
these things, the Turkish medical authorities, and especially 
the Turkish doctor in charge at San Stefano, did their best 
when once they started to work. But when the appalling 
situation arose at San Stefano, when the cholera victims were 
lying like flies on the railway embankment, they took no 
steps to face the situation until they were stimulated to do 
so by the example of Miss Alt and Madame Schneider and 
the pressure of foreign opinion. This was partly due to the 
fatalism of their outlook, to the resignation of their tempera- 
ment, and partly to the disorder which was rife throughout 
their military organisation. As to San Stefano, which is the 
small area I had the opportunity of observing personally, had 
it not been for the spontaneous efforts of Miss Alt, Madame 
Schneider, and Mr. Frew, the Turkish and Greek soldiers who 
were shut up in the cholera camp, without any possibility 
of egress, would have died of hunger and thirst. It must be 
remembered, as I have said before, that among the cholera 
patients there were a great number of soldiers who were 
suffering simply and solely from exhaustion and starvation. 

After the arrival of the British unit of the Red Crescent, 
and that of the Egyptian Red Crescent, matters were got into 
shape at San Stefano, and there was no longer need of volunteers. 
The worst cases had died. Those who had been suffering from 
exhaustion and starvation recovered and were sent home. 
Those who had mild attacks of cholera and dysentery became 
convalescent, and were moved into the tents. Rooms were 
cleared out for the worst cases, and it was possible to introduce 
beds, and to clear up matters. What was at the beginning 
an ante-chamber to Hell was later, I believe, converted into a 
clean hospital with all the necessary appliances and attendants. 

That this was done was due to the initial enterprise of Miss 
Alt and Madame Schneider. They were the leading spirits 
and the soul of this undertaking. Their work was untiring and 
incessant. To have seen Miss Alt at work was a rare privilege. 
Impervious to disgust, but saturated with pity, overflowing with 
love and radiating charity, she threaded her way, bowed with 



CONSTANTINOPLE ONCE MORE 429 

age and with silvered hair, like a good angel or a kind fairy, 
from tent to tent, from room to room, laden with gifts ; un- 
conscious of the filth, disdainful of the stench, blind to the 
hideous sights, she went her way, giving with both hands, 
helping with her arms, cheering with her speech, and healing 
with her smile. Miss Alt came to San Stefano like an angel 
to Hell, and she could have said, like Beatrice : 

" Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce, tale, 
Che la vostra miser ia non mi tange, 
Ne fiamma d' esto incendio non m' assale." 



CHAPTER XXIV 
THE FASCINATION OF RUSSIA 

FROM 1912 until the summer of 1914 I spent the greater 
part of the year in Russia. I was no longer doing 
journalistic work, but I was still writing books on 
Russian life and literature. The longer I stayed in Russia, 
the more deeply I felt the fascination of the country and 
the people. In one of his books Gogol has a passage 
apostrophising his country from exile, and asking her the 
secret of her fascination. " What is," he says, " the 
inscrutable power which lies hidden in you ? Why does 
your aching, melancholy song echo forever in my ears ? 
Russia, what do you want of me ? What is there between 
you and me ? " 

The question has often been repeated, not only by Russians 
in exile, but by foreigners who have lived in Russia, and I 
have often found myself asking it. The country has 
little obvious glamour and attraction. In Russia, as Gogol 
says, the wonders of Nature are not made more wonderful 
by man ; there are no spots where Nature, art, and time 
combine to take the heart with beauty ; where association, 
and even decay are indistinguishably mingled ; and Nature is 
not only beautiful but picturesque ; where time has worked 
magic on man's handiwork, and history has left behind a 
host of phantoms. 

There are many such places in France and in England, 
in Italy, Spain, and Greece, but not in Russia. Russia is a 
country of colonists, where life has been a perpetual struggle 
against the inclemency of the climate, and where the political 
history is the record of a desperate battle against adverse 
circumstances. Russia's oldest city was sacked and burnt 
just at the moment when it was beginning to flourish ; her 
first capital was destroyed by fire in 1812 ; her second capital 



THE FASCINATION OF RUSSIA 431 

dates from the seventeenth century; stone houses are rare 
in the country, and the wooden houses are frequently de- 
stroyed by fire. It is a country of long winters and fierce 
summers, of rolling plains, uninterrupted by mountains and 
unvariegated by valleys. 

But the charm is there. It is felt by people of different 
nationalities and races ; it is difficult, if you live in Russia, 
to escape it, and once you have felt it, you will never be 
quite free from it. The melancholy song, which Gogol says 
wanders from sea to sea over the length and breadth of the 
land, will echo in your heart and haunt the corner of your 
brain. It is impossible to analyse charm, for if charm could 
be analysed it would cease to exist ; and it is difficult to 
define the character of places where beauty makes so little 
instantaneous appeal, and where there is no playground of 
romance, and few ghosts of poetry and of history. 

Turgeniev's descriptions of the country give an idea of 
this peculiar magic. For instance, the story of the summer 
night, when on the plain the children tell each other bogy 
tales ; or the description of that other July evening, when 
out of the twilight, a long way off on the plain, a child's 
voice is heard calling : " Antropka — a — a," and Antropka 
answers : " Wha — a — a — a — a — at ? " and far away out of 
the immensity comes the answering voice : " Come ho — ome, 
because daddy wants to whip you." 

Those who travel in their arm-chair will meet in Turgeniev 
with glimpses, episodes, pictures, incidents, sayings and 
doings, touches of human nature, phases of- landscape, shades 
of atmosphere, which contain the secret and the charm of 
Russia. All who have travelled in Russia not only recognise 
the truth of his pictures, but agree that the incidents which 
he records with incomparable art are a common experience to 
those who have eyes to see. The picturesque peculiar to 
countries rich in historical traditions is absent in Russia ; but 
beauty is not absent, and it is often all the more striking from 
its lack of obviousness. 

This was brought home to me strongly in the summer of 
1913. I was staying in a small wooden house in Central 
Russia, not far from a railway, but isolated from other houses, 
and at a fair distance from a village. The harvest was nearly 
done. The heat was sweltering. The country was parched 



432 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

and dry. The walls and ceilings were black with flies. One 
had no wish to venture out of doors until the evening. 

The small garden of the house, gay with asters and sweet- 
peas, was surrounded by birch trees, with here and there a fir 
tree in their midst. Opposite the little house, a broad pathway, 
flanked on each side by a row of tall birch trees, led to the 
margin of the garden, which ended in a steep grass slope, 
and a valley, or a wooded dip ; and beyond it, on the same 
level as the garden, there was a pathway half hidden by trees ; 
so that from the house, if you looked straight in front of you, 
you saw a broad path, with birch trees on each side of it, 
forming a proscenium for a wooded distance ; and if anybody 
walked along the pathway on the farther side of the dip, 
although you saw no road, you could see the figures in outline 
against the sky, as though they were walking across the back 
of a stage. 

Just as the cool of the evening began to fall, out of the 
distance came a rhythmical song, ending on a note that seemed 
to last for ever, piercingly clear and clean. The music came 
a little nearer, and one could distinguish first a solo chanting 
a phrase, and then a chorus taking it up, and finally, solo and 
chorus became one, and reached a climax on a high note, 
which grew purer and stronger, and more and more long 
drawn-out, without any seeming effort, until it died away. 

The tone of the voices was so high, so pure, and at the 
same time so peculiar, strong and rare, that it was difficult 
at first to tell whether the voices were tenors, sopranos, or 
boyish trebles. They were unlike, both in range and quality, 
the voices of women one usually heard in Russian villages. 
The music drew nearer, and it filled the air with a majestic 
calm. Presently, in the distance, beyond the dip between the 
trees, and in the middle of the natural stage made by the 
garden, I saw, against the sky, figures of women walking slowly 
in the sunset, and singing as they walked, carrying their 
scythes and their wooden rakes with them ; and once again 
the phrase began and was repeated by the chorus ; and once 
again chorus and solo melted together in a high and long- 
drawn-out note, which seemed to swell like the sound of a 
clarion, to grow purer, more single, stronger and fuller, 
till it ended suddenly, sharply, as a frieze ends. The song 
seemed to proclaim rest after toil, and satisfaction for labour 



THE FASCINATION OF RUSSIA 433 

accomplished. It was like a hymn of praise, a broad bene- 
diction, a grace sung for the end of the day : the end of the 
summer, the end of the harvest. It expressed the spirit of the 
breathless August evening. 

The women walked past slowly and disappeared into the 
trees once more. The glimpse lasted only a moment, but it 
was enough to start a long train of thought and to call up 
pictures of rites, ritual, and custom ; of rustic worship and 
rural festival, of Pagan ceremonies older than the gods. 

As another verse of what sounded like a primeval harvest 
hymn began, the brief glimpse of the reapers, erect and majestic 
in the dress of toil, and laden with the instruments of the 
harvest, the high quality of the singing : 

" The undisturbed song of pure concent," 

made the place into a temple of august and sacred calm in the 
quiet light of the evening. The sacerdotal figures that passed 
by, diminutive in the distance, belonged to an archaic vase 
or frieze. The music seemed to seal a sacrament, to be the 
initiation into an immemorial secret, into some remote mystery 
— who knows ? — perhaps the mystery of Eleusis, or into still 
older secrecies of which Eleusis was the far-distant offspring. 
A window had been opened on to another phase of time, on 
to another and a brighter world ; older than Virgil, older than 
Romulus, older than Demeter — a world where the spring, 
the summer, and the autumn, harvest -time, and sowing, the 
gathering of fruits and the vintage, were the gods ; and through 
this window came a gleam from the golden age, a breath from 
the morning and the springtide of mankind. 

When I say that the singing called up thoughts of Greece, 
the thing is less fantastic than it seems. In the first place, 
in the songs of the Russian peasants, the Greek modes are 
still in use : the Dorian, the hypo-Dorian, the Lydian, the 
hypo-Phrygian. " La musique, telle qu'elle etait pratiquee 
en Russie au rnoyen age " (writes M. Soubier in Ins History 
of Russian Music), " ten ait a la tradition des religions et des 
mceurs paiennes." And in the secular as well as in the ecclesi- 
astical music of Russia there is an element of influence which 
is purely Hellenic. It turned out that the particular singers 
I heard on that evening were not local, but a guild of women 
reapers who had come from the government of Tula to work 
28 



434 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

during the harvest. Their singing, although the form and 
kind of song were familiar to me, was different in quality from 
any that I had heard before ; and the impression made by it 
unforgettable. 

Nature in Russia is, broadly speaking, monotonous and 
uniform, but this does not mean that beauty is rare. Not 
only magic moments occur in the most unpromising sur- 
roundings, but beauty is to be found in Russian nature and 
Russian landscape at all times and all seasons in many shapes. 

For instance : a long drive in the evening twilight at harvest- 
time, over the immense hedgeless rolling plains, through stretches 
of golden wheat and rye, variegated with millet, still green 
and not yet turned to the bronze colour it takes later ; when 
you drive for miles over monotonous and yet ever-varying 
fields, and when you see, in the distance, the cranes, settling 
for a moment, and then flying off into space. 

Later in the twilight, continents of dove-coloured clouds 
float in the east, the west is tinged with the dusty afterglow of 
the sunset ; and the half-reaped corn and the spaces of stubble 
are burnished and glow in the heat ; and smouldering fires of 
weeds burn here and there ; and as you reach a homestead, you 
will perhaps see by the threshing-machine, a crowd of dark men 
and women still at their work ; and in the glow from the flame 
of a wooden fire, in the shadow of the dusk, the smoke of 
the engine and the dust of the chaff, they have a Rembrandt- 
like power ; the feeling of space, breadth, and air and immensity 
grows upon one ; the earth seems to grow larger, the sky to 
grow deeper, and the spirit is lifted, stretched, and magnified. 

Russian poets have celebrated more frequently the spring 
and winter — the brief spring which arrives so suddenly after 
the melting of the snows, with the intense green of the birch- 
trees, the uncrumpling fern ; woods carpeted with lilies of the 
valley ; the lilac bushes, the nightingale, and later the briar, 
which flowers in profusion ; and the winter : the long drives 
in a sledge under a leaden sky to the tinkle of monotonous 
bells ; a whistling blizzard with its demons, that lead the horses 
astray in the night ; transparent woods black against an immense 
whiteness ; or covered with snow and frozen, an enchanted 
fabric against the stainless blue ; or, when after a night of thaw, 
the brown branches emerge once more covered with airy threads 
and sparkling drops of dew. 



THE FASCINATION OF RUSSIA 435 

The sunset and twilight of the winter evening after the first 
snow had fallen in December used to be most beautiful. The 
new moon, like a little sail on a cold sea, tinged with a blush 
as it reached the earth, flooded the snow with light, and added 
to its purity ; the snow had a blue glint in it and showed 
up the wooden houses, the red roofs, the farm implements 
in a bold relief ; so that all these prosaic objects of every- 
day life assumed a strange largeness and darkness as they 
loomed between the earth and the sky. 

What I used to enjoy more than anything in Russia were 
the summer afternoons on the river near Sosnofka, where the 
fiat banks were covered with oak-trees, ash, willow, and thick 
undergrowth ; and where every now and then, perch rose to the 
surface to catch flies, and the kingfishers skimmed over the 
surface from reach to reach. Sometimes I used to take a boat 
and row past islands of rushes, and a network of water-lilies, to 
where the river broadened ; and I reached a great sheet of water 
flanked by a weir and a mill. The trees were reflected in the 
glassy surface, and nothing broke the stillness but the grumbling 
of the mill and the cries of the children bathing. 

Near the village, all through the summer night (this was 
in June 1914), I used to hear song answering song, and the 
brisk rhythm of the accordion ; or the interminable humming, 
buzzing burden of the three-stringed balalaika ; verse succeeded 
verse of an apparently tireless song, and the end of each verse 
seemed to beget another and give a keener zest to the next ; 
and the song waxed faster and madder, as if the singer were 
intoxicated by the sound of his own music. 

But the peculiar manifestations of the beauty of nature in 
a flat and uniform country are not enough to account for the 
fascination of Russia. Beauty is a part of it, but it is not 
all. Against these things in the other scale you had to put 
dirt, squalor, misery, slovenliness, disorder, and the uninspir- 
ing wooden provincial towns, the dusty or sodden roads, the 
frequent grey skies, the long and heavy sameness. 

The advocatus diaboli had a strong case. He could have 
drawn up a powerful indictment, not only against the political 
conditions, and the arbitrary and uncertain administration, 
but also against the character of the people ; he could mention 
the moral laxity, the extravagant self-indulgence, the lack of 
control, the jealousy which hounded any kind of superiority ; and 



436 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

looked with suspicion on all that was original or distinguished ; 
the dead level of mediocrity ; the stereotyped bureaucratic 
pattern which you could not escape from. The Russians, he 
would say, had all the faults of the Orient without any of its 
austerer virtues ; Russia, he would say, was a nation of in- 
effectual rebels under the direction of a band of corrupt and 
time-serving officials. The indictment was true, but however 
glaring the faults which Russian moralists, satirists, and 
politicians used so frequently and so loudly to deplore, the 
faults that used to make foreigners in Russia so angry at times, 
they seemed to me the negative results of positive qualities so 
valuable as to outweigh them altogether. 

During my stays in Russia I saw some of the worst as well 
as some of the best aspects of the country and its people. 
The net result of all I saw and all I experienced was the sense 
of an overpowering charm in the country, an indescribable 
fascination in the people. The charm was partly due to the 
country itself, partly to the manner of life lived there, and 
partly to the nature of the people. The qualities that did 
exist, and whose benefit I experienced, seemed to me the most 
precious of all qualities ; the virtues the most important of all 
virtues ; the glimpses of beauty the rarest in kind ; the songs 
and the music the most haunting and most heart-searching ; 
the poetry nearest to nature and man ; the human charity 
nearest to God. 

This is perhaps the secret of the whole matter, that the 
Russian soul is filled with a human Christian charity which is 
warmer in kind and intenser in degree, and expressed with a 
greater simplicity and sincerity, than is to be met with in any 
other people ; it was the existence of this quality behind 
everything else which gave charm to Russian life (however 
squalid the circumstances might be), poignancy to its music, 
sincerity and simplicity to its religion, manners, intercourse, 
music, singing, verse, art, acting — in a word to its art, its life, 
and its faith. 

Never did I realise this so much as one day when I was driv- 
ing on a cold and damp December evening in St. Petersburg 
in a cab. It was dark, and I was driving along the quays from 
one end of the town to the other. For a long time I drove 
in silence, but after a while I happened to make some remark 
to the cabman about the weather. He answered gloomily 



THE FASCINATION OF RUSSIA 437 

that the weather was bad and so was everything else too. For 
some time we drove on in silence, and then in answer to 
some other stray remark or question of mine he said he 
had been unlucky that day in the matter of a fine. It 
was a trivial point, but somehow or other my interest 
was aroused, and I got him to tell me the story, which was 
a case of bad luck and nothing serious ; but when he had 
told it, he gave such a profound sigh that I asked whether 
it was that which was still weighing upon him. Then he 
said " No," and slowly began to tell me a story of a great 
catastrophe which had just befallen him. He possessed a little 
land, and a cottage in the country, not far from St. Petersburg. 
His house had been burnt. It was true the house was 
insured, but the insurance was not sufficient to make an 
appreciable difference. He had two sons ; one went to 
school, and the other had some employment in the provinces. 
The catastrophe of the fire had upset everything. All his 
belongings had perished. He could no longer send his boy 
to school. His second son, in the country, had written to 
say he was engaged to be married, and had asked his consent, 
advice, and approval. " He has written twice," said the cab- 
man, " and I keep silence (iya molchu). What can I answer ? " 
I cannot give any idea of the strength, simplicity, and poignancy 
of the tale as it came, hammered out slowly, with pauses between 
each sentence, with a dignity of utterance and a purity of 
idiom which used to be the precious privilege of the poor in 
Russia. The words came as if torn out from the bottom of his 
heart. He made no complaint ; there was no grievance, no 
whine in the story. He stated the bald facts with a simplicity 
which was overwhelming. In spite of all, his faith in God and 
his consent to the will of Providence was unshaken, certain, 
and sublime. 

This happened in 191 1. I have forgotten the details; but I knew 
I had been face to face with a human soul, stripped and naked, 
and a human soul in the grip of a tragedy. This experience, 
which brought one in touch with the divine, is one which, I 
think, could only in such circumstances occur in Russia. I 
wrote this in the year 1913 when I was summing up my im- 
pressions on Russian life, and trying to analyse the nature 
of the fascination the country had for me. When I had 
finished, I echoed the words which R. L. Stevenson once 



438 THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY 

addressed to a French novelist : " J'ai beau admirer les autres 
de toute ma force, c'est avec vous que je me complais a vivre." 

In the summer of 1914 I went back to Russia for the 
last time before the war. I spent over a month by myself at 
Sosnofka, writing a book, an outline of Russian literature, 
and bathing every afternoon in the river where the sweetbriar 
grew on the banks by the willows, and the kingfisher used every 
now and then to dart across the oily-looking water. 

It was a wonderful spring. The nightingales sang all day 
long in the garden ; and all night long people were singing in 
the village. Nature was steeped in beauty and calm. It was 
a month of accidental retreat before tremendous events and 
the changing of the world. 

I knew nothing of public events, but I was suddenly seized 
with the desire to go home. I debated whether to go or not. I 
had finished my book, but as I meant to come back to Russia 
in August it seemed perhaps foolish to go. I thought I would 
leave it to chance. I decided to take the Sortes Shakespeariance. 
I opened a volume at random, and my pencil fell on the phrase : 
" Pack and be gone " [Comedy of Errors, hi. 2, 158). I waited 
another day and repeated the experiment. My pencil again 
fell on the same line. Then I settled to go. I started one 
evening, and in the morning when I arrived at the Friedrichs- 
strasse Station at Berlin, I saw in the newspapers the news 
of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke. I might have 
said : " Incipit vita nova," but I didn't. I didn't even think 
it. I was merely conscious of a small cloud on an otherwise 
stainless sky. 



INDEX 



A.D.C, the, 144, 153. 

A. R. at Cambridge, 146. 

Abbi Constantin (/.'), 92, 305. 

Abdul Hamid, dethroned, 397. 

Abingdon, 142. 

Acropolis, Athens, 254, 256. 

Addington, 138. 

Adondis, Shelley, 161, 163. 

Adrienne Lecouvreur, 232 ; produced 
by Sarah Bernhardt, 305 ; Scribe 
and Legouves, 308-9. 

Adventures of Sophy, Violet Fane, 247. 

Afoo, Chinese servant, 276, 279-80. 

Agadir crisis, 212. 

Agincourt, Admiral Glyn's ship, 47. 

Aiglon (L'), 233, 243 ; first per- 
formance, the Hon. Maurice 
Baring's article in the Speaker, 
199-204 ; Sarah Bernhardt in, 

305- 
Ainger's (House), Eton, 88. 
Airlie, Lady, 62. 
Aladin, deputy, 340, 347. 
Albani, Madame, 27, 52. 
Albanians in Uskub, 415-16. 
Albert Hall, 26, 139. 

— Prince, 131. 
Albo, Pomeranian, 39. 
Alexander, butler, 220, 223. 

— comic actor. 136. 

Alexandra, Queen, 348 ; visit to 

Copenhagen, 225-26. 
Alexandria, 168. 
Alexandrovna, Marie, 348 note. 
Alexei, boot-boy, 220. 
Alexeieff, Viceroy, 263. 
Alice in Wonderland, 170. 
Allen, Mr. J., 154. 
Alt, Miss, at San Stefano, 421-29 

passim. 
Am ants, Maurice Donnay, 166. 
Ame paienne (Z'), Brewster, 250. 
American-Spanish War, 71. 
Amour de PArt, Labiche, 86. 
Andersen, Hans, 208. 
Anderson, Mary, in The Lady of 

Lyons, 53-54. 



Anderton's Hotel, 151. 

Andre, watchman, 220, 222. 

Andromaque, 243. 

Angelo, Hugo, 305. 

Angelo, Michael, a farmhouse of, 167. 

Angers, 198. 

Anglo-Saxon Review, poem by the 
Hon. Maurice Baring, 198. 

Anna Karenina, 219. 

Annie, nursemaid, 2, 8, 19, 37. 

Annunzio, Gabriele d\ poems, 140, 
232 ; Vernon Lee on, 187 ; 
La Gioconda, 305, 309 ; pro- 
posed dramatic version of Paolo 
and Francesco, 246. 

Antoine, actor, 197. 

— Theatre, 265. 
Antrim, Lord, 24. 

Apostles, Society of the, 145-46. 

April Fools' Day memories, 24-25. 

Apron Stage, use in Copenhagen 
theatres, 210. 

Aranci Bay, 395. 

Arbuthnot, 68. 

Archangel, 358, 360. 

Archer, Fred, 83. 

Archibald, photographer, 276-77. 

Arena Nazionale, Florence, 311. 

Army, the Russian, condition at open- 
ing of the Duma, 340-41 ; dis- 
content, 353. 

— the Turkish, weapons of the, 413. 
Arnaut refugees, 416. 

Arnim, Frau von, 136. 

Arnold, Matthew, no, 112, 414. 

Art Theatre, Moscow, 265-66, 323-24. 

Artemis, Mr. Gladstone's lecture on, 

108. 
Arthur, Port, 263, 314. 
Arundel Park, a May night, 4-5. 
As in a Looking-Glass, 93-94, 232. 
Ascot, the school at, 68-86. 

— races, 79-80. 
Ashburton, Lady, 26. 

— Lord, 62. 

Asquith, Raymond, The North Street 
Gazette, 390-95. 



440 



INDEX 



Assisi, earthquake at, 158-59. 

Assiz Bey, 397. 

Assumption, Cathedral of the, Moscow, 

334-35- 
Astrakan, the journey to, 375-79 ; 

atmosphere, 380. 
Astrophel, Swinburne, 148. 
Atalanta, newspaper, 112. 
Athalie, 233, 235-36. 
Athens, 254-56. 

— Eton, 117. 
Atkins, Dr., 41. 
Aurele, Madame, 66. 

Austria, Archduke of, assassinated, 438. 
Aventuritre (L'), 230. 

Bach, "Passion Music of St. Matthew," 

103. 
Bachelors' Club, 139. 
Baden, Grand Duchess of, 216. 
Bagshot, 76. 

Baikal, Lake, 269-70, 311. 
Baines, Dr., 427. 

Balakirev, Russian folk-songs, 408. 
Balfour, Reginald, at Angers, 19S-99. 
Balkan War, 1912, 395. 
Balliol, 170-72. 
Ballooning experiences, 204-5. 
Balzac, 94, 141. 
Banck, M., 98. 
Bancrofts, the, 51, 53. 
Banville, Theodore de, 22S ; on Sarah 

Bernhardt, 229 note ; Canines 

Parisiens, 243. 

— Theophile, on La Femme de Claude, 

306. 
Barbier de Seville, 310. 
Baretta, acting of, 93, 230. 
Bariatinsky, Princess, 247. 
Baring Brothers, the financial crisis, 

1890, 113. 

— General, 62. 

— Rowland, 82. 

— the Hon. Cecil, 13, 14, 27, 46, 48, 

54, 58, 65, 107. 

— the Hon. Elizabeth, 9-13, 22-25, 

32, 38, 43-44 ; at Ascot, 79-80 ; 
marriage, 85-86; house of, 113. 

— the Plon. Everard, 13, 14, 32, 37, 

65 ; the " Imp," 40 ; at Eton, 
46, 48-49. 
— ■ the Hon. Hugo, boyhood, 2-3, 9, 
11, 14, 16, 21, 23, 26; in the 
schoolroom, 36-41 ; yachting, 
44 ; Mr. Warre and, 46 ; Mem- 
bland, 59-60 ; Marlborough 
House parties, 80 ; Ascot school, 
81; Eastbourne, 82; "Miss 



Hastings," 83 ; the game of 
" Spankaboo," 83-84; Cowes, 
85 ; Paris, 93 ; Eton, 105, 107, 

"3. 115- 
Baring, the Hon. John (now Lord 
Revelstoke), 13, 14, 20, 27, 
44-46, 65, 68, 102, 107, 135. 

— the Hon. Margaret (married Robert 

Spencer), 8-12, 21-23, 35. 43~ 
44, 85, 107-8. 

— the Hon. Susan, 9-13, 16, 21, 23- 

25, 35. 44, 74, 85,^86, 91-94. 

— Wyndham, 82. 
Barnay, Ludwig, 136. 

Barnby, Mr. Joseph, organist, 102-3. 
Barnes Pool, 95. 

Barrack Room Ballads, Kipling, 148. 
Bartet in Le Fire Prodigue, 140 ; in 

Berenice, 192. 
Bastille, the, 93. 
Bath, visits to, 76, 130. 

— House, 26, 85. 
Battery Cottage, 40. 

Bauman, death, 320 ; funeral, 321-22. 

Bayreuth Festival, 133-35, 153-54, 168. 

Beardsley, Aubrey, 144, 149. 

Beam, Madame de, 254. 

Beauchamp, editor of the Eton Review, 
in. 

Beeching, Mr., 148. 

Beerbohm, Max, 147-48, 155 ; on 
Rugby football, 74 > correspon- 
dence in the Saturday Review, 

Beer-drinking rules in Germany, 121- 
125. 

Beethoven, 211. 

Beggars, Russian, 377. 

Belgrade Station, 406, 40S. 

Bell, casting of a, 382-85. 

Bell, schoolfellow, 77, 79, S3. 

Belle Htlene (La), 197. 

Belle Alaman, 93. 

Belle-Isle, a visit to, 216-18. 

Belloc, Hilary, at Oxford, 170-72 ; 
"Bad Child's Book of Beasts," 
171 ; Verses and Sonnets, 171 ; 
The North Street Gazette, 390- 
95 ; The Four Men, 391 ; The 
Eye Witness, 395. 

Ben Hur, 105. 

Benckendorff, Constantine, 263. 

— Count, on Delaunay, 67 ; in Copen- 
hagen, 208-9 ; at the Russian 
Legation, 212 ; personality, 213- 
15 ; invitations to the Hon. 
Maurice Baring, 218-24; in 
London, 261 ; on Russia, 268, 



INDEX 



441 



Benckendorff, Pierre, 223-24, 268. 

Benelli, Signor, 140. 

Benson, Arthur, at Eton, 100, 104, 

110-12, 116-17, 147, 259; 

poems, 138; house of, 142; 

style, 148. 

— E. F., Dodo, 138, 149. 

— Mrs., 138. 

Benzon, Otto, comedies, 210-11. 

Berenice, Racine, 192-93. 

Berlin, 133 ; rooms in Unter den 

Linden, 135-37 ; Friedrichs- 

strasse Station, 438. 

— University, 136-37. 
Berliner Tageblatt, 276. 
Berliner Theater, the, 136. 
Bernhardt, Sarah, 187, 197 ; in 

Hernani, 53 ; As in a 
Looking- Glass, 93-94; in La 
Tosca, 107 ; and Eleonora 
Duse, 136 ; at Daly's, 167 ; 
in L'Aiglon, 199-200, 204 ; her 
home in Belle-Isle, 216-17 '■> 
personality, 217-18, 227-44; 
her interpretation of Hamlet, 
2 39 _ 4 J ; hn La Dame aux 
Camillas, 241 ; Angelo pro- 
duced, 305 ; in Zfl Femme de 
Claude, 307 ; Fidora, 309 ; her 
greatness, 309-10. 

Bertie, Sir Frank, 180. 

Bilky, coachman, 40. 

Bingen, 133. 

Bismarck, 127, 129; sayings of, 139; 
on the English, 173, 175 ; 
remark concerning Constanti- 
nople, 419. 

Bizet, tomb, 94. 

Black Gang, in Moscow, 320-23. 

Blackwood, Basil, 71, 171. 

Bletchington, Captain, 44-45. 

Blunt, Lady Anne, 169. 

— Sir Wilfrid, 169. 

Board of Trade, offices of the, 157. 
Bobrinsky, Count, 280. 

— Count Andre, 388. 

— Count Lev, 388-90. 

— Countess, 389-90. 

Boer War, feeling between Germany 

and England, 174-75. 
Boileau, reading of, 152. 
Bois de Boulogne, 16, 67, 92. 
Boissier, 36. 
Boito, opera, 310. 
Bolsheviks, national anthem of the, 

321 note. 
Bonn, 133. 
Borthwick, Oliver, 268. 



Boris Godotinov, 310. 

Bosanquet, editor of the Parachute, in. 

Boswell, a quotation, 185. 

Bouchier, Mr., 104. 

Bottffons (Les), 233. 

Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 75- 

Bourget, parody on, 194-95. 

Bourke, Harry, 43. 

Bowden, Father Sebastian, 395-96. 

Brachet, Grammaire Historique, 1 14. 

Brackley, at Eton, 89. 

Braisne, 89. 

Brandes, Dr. George, 211. 

— Frau, 133. 

Braun, boy at Hildesheim, 120-21 ; 

explains beer-drinking, 121-23. 

Breguet watches, presents of, 55-56, 

Brewster, 139, 184 ; works of, 249-51 ; 
L'Ame paienne, 250 ; on Ver- 
laine, 251 ; on the production 
of Shakespeare, 251-52 ; the 
Prison, 252 ; in Rome, 259-60. 

Bridges, Robert, pamphlets of verse, 
148. 

Brinkman prize, the, 91. 

British Encyclopedia, article by the 
Hon. Maurice Baring, 226. 

Brizzi, Signor, 52. 

Broadwood, at Ascot, 78-79 ; at East- 
bourne, 82-85 5 at Eton, 87. 

— Colonel, 76. 
Brocken, climbing the, 128. 
Brohan, Madeleine, 230. 
Brompton Oratory, 395-96. 

Bronte, Charlotte, 228 ; Jane Eyre, 
106. 

Brooke, Guy, 269, 271, 280, 292. 

Brothers Karamazov (The), Dostoiev- 
sky, 293. 

Broughton Castle, 204. 

Brown, Mrs., sock-shop, 95-96, 105, 
117. 

Browne, Miss Pinkie, 61-62. 

Browning, Oscar, 153. 

— Robert, 151, 169. 
Brusa, 404-5. 
Bucharest, 418. 
Buckstone, art of, 51. 
Bulgarians, spirit of the, 416-17. 
Bullock, Mr., guard at Paddington, 

6-7. 
Bulteel, Bessie, 48, 54, 58, 61, 66. 

— Effie (Aunt), 34, 47. 

— Lady Elizabeth, 29-30. 

— (Uncle Johnny), 34, 40, 57-58, 176. 
Burcher, Mr., librarian at Eton, no, 

116. 



442 



INDEX 



Burlington House, 56. 

Burne-Jones, 56, 232, 235. 

Burschenschaft, 125-26. 

Butat, M., 27, 28. 

Byron, 50, 58, 126, 186; qtioted, 50, 

282 ; Arthur Benson and, 112 ; 

Professor Ihne on, 163 ; the 

singer of Greece, 255. 

Cafe de Paris, 92. 

Cairo, the Agency, 168-69. 

Califano, 95. 

Calverley, 145. 

Cambridge, 141 ; King's College, 143- 

45 ; debating societies, 143 ; 

Society of the Apostles, 145-46; 

work done by the Hon. Maurice 

Baring, 151-53. 
Cambridge ABC, newspaper, 144. 
Cambridge University Press, pamphlet 

of poems by the Hon. Maurice 

Baring, 199. 
Camt'es Parisiens, Banville, 243. 
Cameron, Miss Violet, 28. 
Campbell, Herbert, 24, 83. 

— Mrs. Patrick, 56, 149 ; in The 

Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, 157— 
58 ; in Magda, 167 ; in Pelleas, 

3°5- 

— minor, Ascot, 79. 

— Niall, 71. 

Captain Swift, at the Haymarket, 

107. 
Card games, German, 124. 
Carducci, 140. 

Carlyle, Arthur Benson and, 112. 
Carmen, 187. 
Carnac, temple of, 169. 
Carr, editor of the Parachute, 11 1. 
Carr-Bosanquet, parody on Kipling, 

144 ; humour of, 144-45 '■> 

rooms of, 153. 
Carregi, 167. 
Carrol, Lewis, 1S0. 
Caruso, 52. 

Castellane, Count Boni de, 206. 
Castiglione, Madame de, 196. 
Catherine II., 339, 355. 
Cavalleria Rusticana, 133. 
Cecil, Lord Sackville, 166-67. 
Cemented Bricks Society, 151. 
" Cercle de l'Union," 184, 196, 206. 
Cercle des Dibats (Le), 113. 
Certosa, the, 159. 
Cetonia, schooner, 45. 
Chaika, by Tchekhov, 323. 
Chaliapine, 263, 309-10, 376-77. 
Chantilly, 205. 



Charles, Prince and Princess, of Den- 
mark, 225. 

Chatelet, the, Paris, 92. 

Cherie, French governess, 9-138 
passim. 

Chernaye, village of, 325-26. 

Cherry Orchard, Tchekhov, 266, 268. 

Chesterton, Cecil, The New Witness, 

395- 

— Gilbert, 395. 
Chevrillon, Andre, 195. 
Childe Harold, 112. 
Children, notes on, 373~74. 
Children of the Sun, Gorky, 323. 
Chinese Catholic priests, 283. 
Chit-Chat Debating Society, 144. 
Cholera in San Stefano, 419-29. 
Chough's Nest, Lynton, 197-98. 
Christians in Uskub, massacre pre- 
vented, 414-16. 

Christie, Mrs., education of the 

children, 11-158. 
Christmas in Germany, 155-56. 
Church, Stories from Homer, 46. 
Churchill, Winston, at Ascot, 71. 
Civil Service Commission, 177. 
Clairin, 217. 
Clapshaw, Mr., 89. 
Clarendon, Lady, 55. 
Clarke, at Eton, 103. 

— Rev. Dawson, 154. 
Clarkson, Mr., 153. 
Clemenceau, M., 195. 
Cleopatra, the M.S., 169. 
Clifford, Lady de, 62. 
Clothes, nationality and, 373- 
Clubs in Heidelberg, 125. 
Cluny Musee, 92. 
Coblenz, 133. 

Cocart et Bicoquet, 92. 

Coleridge, 240; "Ancient Mariner" 
quoted, 270. 

Coliseum, Rome, 246. 

Collins, an essay on, by the Hon. 
Maurice Baring, 142. 

Cologne, 133. 

Colonial Office, 177. 

Comedie francaise, 230, 265. 

Compiegne, 198. 

Congreve, 148. 

"Conscripts' Farewell (The)," 61. 

Constantinople, rebellion 1909, 397- 
98 ; Russian pilgrims in, 
400-1 ; the new Sultan, 401-4 ; 
Adrianople Gate, 402 ; Novem- 
ber impressions, 418-20 ; 
cholera at San Stefano, 419- 
429. 



INDEX 



443 



Contrexeville, 56, 65-67, 81, 153. 
Coombe Cottage, near Maiden, 3-7, 

10, 12, 14, 17. 
Copeman, Miss, at Eton, 87, 99-100, 

112. 
Copenhagen, British Legation, 207- 

26 ; Tivoli music-hall, 209 ; 

the Bred Gade, 212. 
Coppee, Francois, Le Passant, 228. 
Coquelin in L Etourdi, 107 ; vaVAbbi 

Constantin, 305 ; art of, 51, 

199, 230, 243. 
Corfu, 256. 
Corinth, 254. 
Cornish, Gerald, 116. 

— Hubert, at Heidelberg, 118, 124- 

26, 128, 133 ; in Naples, 141 ; 
Cambridge, 143, 146 ; journal- 
ism, 144 ; criticism of the new 
poets, 150; Devonshire, 198. 
— ■ Mr., at Eton, 88, 98, 117, 141-42, 
180. 

— Mrs., 114. 
Cosham, 114. 

Cossacks, fire on crowd at Bauman's 
funeral, 322 ; attitude during 
the Revolution, 353 ; on the 
Volga steamers, 375. 

Country Girl in St. Petersburg, 324. 

Covent Garden Opera House, A'ida, 

53- 
Coventry, Willie, no, 112, 1 15-16. 
Cowes Regatta, 44, 85. 
Cowley, 155. 
Cowper, " Hark my Soul," 50. 

— Lord, 176. 
Crackenthorpe, 147. 

Crawford, Marion, Mr. Isaacs, 50 ; a 

favourite author, 105-6. 
Crawshay, Mrs., 245. 
Crecy, forest of, 205. 
Cremer's, Bond Street, 5 ; Regent 

Street, 7. 
Crime and Punishment, Dostoievsky, 

293. 
Croizette, 230. 
Cromer, Lord, 82, 396 ; Modern Egypt, 

168-69 5 on Lord Salisbury's 

Foreign policy, 178. 
Croome Court, 112. 
Crosbie, Mr., 40, 135. 
Crowds, Russian, 383-85. 
Cruises in 1908, 395. 
Crum, at Eton, 116. 
Cuckoo Weir, 95. 
Cunliffe, at Eton, 108. 
Cuppy, Mr. Hazlitt Alva, 124, 127. 
Curcin, Dr. Milan, 410-n, 412, 417. 



Currie, Lady, 245-47, 261-62. 

— Lord, in Rome, 245-47, 261-62. 

Cust, Harry, 62, 149. 

Cuyp, 16. 

Cyrano de Bergerac, 200-3, 2 43- 

Daily Mail, 275. 

Daily News, 148. 

Daily Telegraph, 276. 

Daly's Theatre, Sarah Bernhardt at, 

167. 
Damala, M., 53. 
Dame aux Camilias, Sarah Bernhardt 

in, 136, 231, 241 ; Duse in, 

235> 3°9- 

Damozel Blanche, by the Hon. Maurice 
Baring, 113. 

Dancing lessons, 25-26. 

Dante, quoted, 140, 404. 

Darmsteter, Madame, 195. 

Dart, the, 374. 

Dartmoor, 31, 57. 

Datchet, regatta, 142. 

Daudet, Alphonse, 105. 

Davantientung, life in, 283-86. 

David Grieve, Mrs. H. Ward, 148. 

Davidson, John, 147-48, 151. 

Day of My Lije at Eton (A), 144. 

Deacon, Mr., 6, 27, 39, 63. 

Debating Societies, Eton, 113; Cam- 
bridge, 143-44. 

Decemviri Debating Society, 143-44, 

153- 

Delaunay, art of, 51, 67, 230. 

Delcasse, M., 184. 

Delos, 256. 

Delphi, rocks of, 254. 

Denmark, King of, 209-10; and King 

Edward vn., 224-25. 
Der Wald, Ethel Smyth, 215. 
Derby, the, 167. 
Desclee, 52. 
Devonshire, visits to, 5, 6 ; scenery 

compared with South Russia, 

386. 
Devonshire House, fancy dress ball, 

1897, 176. 
Dickens, Charles, reading of, 53 ; 

humour of, 298. 
Die Alte Tante, 119. 
Die Ehre, Sudermann, 136. 
Dillon, Dr., 324. 
Dimitri, servant, 282. 
Dimitriev-Mamonov, Alexander, 314. 
Dimmock, 9-135 passim. 
Diplomatic Service, examinations for 

the, 153-56. 
Dittel, Herr, 169. 



444 



INDEX 



Dodo, Benson, 138, 149. 

Doll's House,, Ibsen, 136 ; in Copen- 
hagen, 210-11 ; Duse in, 309. 

Don Giovanni, 186, 211. 

Donizetti, 52. 

Donnay, Maurice, Amants, 166. 

Donne, lines quoted, 226. 

Dostoievsky, novels of, 261, 293 ; 
Nazarenko's opinion of, 343. 

Dowson, Ernest, 149 ; poem by, 150. 

Doyle, Conan, 381. 

Drachman, Holger, Gurre, 210, 21 1. 

Drake, Ingalton, 95. 

Dresden, 118, 133; picture gallery, 

J 35- 

Drew, Mr., 97. 

Dreyfus campaign, 184-85, 195-97, 
209. 

Drury Lane Pantomimes, Mother Goose, 
8, 83, 245 ; Duse at, 167. 

Du Lau, M., 192, 206-7. 

Du Maurier, 55 ; cited, 321. 

Duckworth, at Ascot, 73. 

Dudley, Lady Georgiana, 196. 

Duels in Heidelberg, 127-28. 

Dufferin, Lord, in Paris, 166. 

Duma, the Russian, opening of first, 
33 2 , 339-41 ; dissolution, 341- 
42 ; discussions about the, 353— 
54 ; the third, 390. 

Dumas fils, Alexandre, 141, 230 ; 
Comme Elles sont Toutes, 85- 
86; Dame aux Cams' lias, 136, 
2 3 I > 3°9 j La Femmede Claude, 
235, 305-8 ; La Visile de Noccs, 
305> 308. 

Dunglass, at Eton, 89, 102, 105-6, 
115-16. 

Durnford, Mr. Walter, 46, 63, 116. 

Duse, Eleonora, art of, 52-53, 136, 
167, 309—10 ; in La Dame aux 
Came lias, 184 ; as Magda, 210, 
234-35; in Fidora, 231, 309; 
at the Waldorf Theatre, 305 ; in 
La Femme de Claude, 306-8 ; in 
The Second Mrs. Tanqtieray, 
309 ; in La Gioconda, 309. 

Dutch Reformed Church, Constan- 
tinople, 422. 

Dyce, his Shakespeare, 185. 

E. at Timmes, 161-64. 

Eagle, shop in Edgware Road, 28. 

Earthquake at Assisi, 158-59. 

" East and West," Hilary Belloc, 391- 

92. 
Easter in Russia, 155 ; Moscow 

festivities, 334~39- 



Ebb Tide, Stevenson, 148. 
Edgecombe, Colonel, 15, 60-61. 
Edgecumbe, Lady Ernestine, 61. 

— Lord Mount, 60-63. 
Edinburgh, Duchess of, 348. 
Edouard, Les Enfants d'Edouard, 2 1 . 
Edward vn., in Denmark, 224-25. 
Edwin and Angelina, Violet Fane, 

245- 
Egerton, Francis, 98. 
Egypt, 168. 

Egyptian Red Crescent, 427-28. 
Eiffel Tower, 93. 

Ekaterinoslav Regiment, the, 335. 
Eldorado Paris Music Hall, 66. 
Elgin, Lord, 255. 
Eliot, George, 106, 112. 
Elliot, Charles, 191. 
Ellis, Colonel, 60. 

— Edwin, 149. 

— Gerald, 60. 

— Mr., carpenter, 42, 59. 
Elsinore, 224-25. 

En Paix, 197. 

Encyclopedia Britannica, articles by 
the Hon. Maurice Baring, 261. 

English Lyrics, Le Gallienne, 149. 

Enver Pasha, 397. 

Epic of Hades, Lewis Morris, 98. 

Esclangon, M., 154-55. 

Eton, Warre's House, 13, 14; 4th of 
June, 65, 106-7 > Lower Chapel, 
89 ; first summer half, 94-95 ; 
sock-shops, 95-96 ; duty of the 
prepostor, 96, 100; masters, 
96-100 ; religious instruction, 
100-1 ; music lessons, 101-3 ; 
ragging of masters, 103-4 ; 
breakfasts with the Head Master, 
107 ; New Schools opened by 
Queen Victoria, 108 ; Mr. 
Gladstone's speech on classical 
education, 108-9 '■> system of 
punishments, 109-10 ; the 
School library, no, 116; the 
boats, 1 12-13; Debating 
Societies, 1 13-14 ; Tercentenary, 
1891, 114; the Prince Consort 
prize (1891) won by the Hon. 
Maurice Baring, 114-16 ; House 
matches, 1 15 ; the playing fields, 
117 ; Mr. Cornish Vice-Provost, 
141-42 ; newspapers and books 
about, 144 ; compared with 
Cambridge, 170 ; Cloisters, 180. 
Eton and Harrow match, 64-65, 115. 
Eton Boating Song, 103. 
Eton Chronicle, 144. 



INDEX 



445 



Eton Review, the, III. 
Eton Volunteers, 108. 
Etourdi (/.'), Coquelin, 107. 
Evans' House, Eton, 88. 
Executions, Turkish, 398-99. 
Exhibition, the Paris, 1900, 93. 
Eye Witness ( The), editors, 395. 
Eyoub, Mosque of, 402, 403. 

Faguet, M. Emile, 242 ; Propos de 

ThMtre, 243. 
Fair at Nijni-Novgorod, 371-73. 
Falka, 28. 

Fanshawe, Miss, 50. 
Eantasio, Ethel Smyth, 216. 
Fargeuil, 53. 

Farms in South Russia, 387. 
Fashoda crisis, 178. 
Fame, President, death of, 187. 
Faust, Goethe, 26, 136, 164 ; Gounod, 

136. 
Favart, Madame, 230. 
Febvre, 230. 
Fechter, 51. 

Ft'dora, Sardou, 231, 305, 309. 
Femme de Claude (La), Duse in, 

305-9- 
Feodor, peasant, 348-49. 
Feuillet, Octave, 106. 
Fidel io, 324. 
Field, Michael, 151. 
Fielding, III. 
Figaro, the, 143. 
Fires, Russian village, 3S2. 
First Siberian Corps, 29S. 
Fish, Hamilton, 71. 
Fisher, Commander, 395. 
Fitzgerald, Arthur Benson and, 112. 
Fletcher, 171. 
Flete, 33-34- 
Florence, 140-41, 1 58 ; June nights, 

4; the earthquake, 158-60; 

Giotto's Tower, 167. 
Foire de Jambon, La, Paris, 92. 
Foix, Gaston de, statue at Milan, 302. 
Folkestone, Lady, 54. 
Fontaine, La, Fables, 20, 352. 
Fontainebleu, 205 ; forest of, 198. 
Fontanka, the, Countess ShuvalofPs 

house, 263. 
Food of the Gods, Wells, 285. 
Ford, Major, 420-29. 
Foreign Office, African Department, 

177-80 ; the Commercial De- 
partment, 260-61. 
Forster, Birket, 16. 
Fort des Poulains, house of Sarah 

Bernhardt, 216-17. 



Fortune-telling, 352. 

Forum, the, 259. 

Four Men (The), Belloc, 391. 

Foyod, 92. 

France, Anatole, works, 141 ; criticism 
by the Hon. Maurice Baring, 
J S6- 57 ; parody on, 194-95, 
213 ; his receptions, 1S4-85, 
195-96 ; Count Pasolini and, 
249. 

Franconia, the, 125. 

Franco-Prussian War, 51, 129. 

Frank, footman, 27. 

Frani Fairleigh, 68. 

Frankfort, 133. 

Frascati, 259. 

Frdulein Schmidt und Mr, Anstruther, 
370. 

Frederick, Empress, 88, 129. 

— the Great, rooms at Potsdam, 129. 
Frew, Mr., 422-29. 

Fullerton, Lady Georgiana, Too 

Strange not to be True, 48. 
Fun-chu-Ling, village, 299. 

Gaedke, Colonel, 276-77, 281. 

Galata Bridge, executions, 39S-400. 

Gale, Norman, 153 ; Country Lyrics, 
148. 

Galgenberg, the, 119. 

Gallienne, Richard le, 147 ; English 
Lyrics, 149 ; " What of the 
Darkness," 150; friendship of, 

151- 

Gallifet, General, 1S4, 196-97, 206-7. 

— Madame de, 193. 
Gambeiaia, villa, 167. 
Garrick, 227. 

— Chambers, London, 154, 156. 

— Club, 154. 

— Theatre, 157, 310. 
Geissler, Dr., 422. 
Gemier, actor, 197. 
Genesis, Andrew Lang, 148. 
"Georgian poets," 412; Books of 

Georgian Poetry, 147. 

Geradmer, 67. 

Gericault, tomb, 94. 

German Crown Prince, in Jubilee pro- 
cession, 85. 

— Emperor, 44 ; visit to Eton, 108 ; 

at Queen Victoria's funeral, 

216. 
Germany, antipathy towards England, 

129; remarks on, 172-73. 
Ghosts, Ibsen, 323. 
Gievko, 386-88. 
Gilbert and Sullivan operas, 24, 25. 



446 



INDEX 



"Gilles," 67. 

Gioconda, D'Annunzio, 305 ; Duse in, 

309- 

Giorgone, 185. 

Giroux, 35. 

Gladstone, Hon. W. E., Lady Dorothy 
Nevill on, 15 ; reputation at 
Ascot, 77-78 ; lecture at Eton, 
108-9. 

Glenesk, Lord, 268. 

Gluck, 185, 210; Orpheo, 211. 

Glyn, Admiral, 47. 

Godziadan, 312. 

Goethe, poetry of, 51, 126; Faust, 
136, 164, 311. 

Gogol, novels, 261, 364 ; humour of, 
298 ; on Russia, 430, 431. 

Golden Horn, view, 397. 

Goldoni, La Locandiera, 305. 

Goomes, Captain, 44. 

Gorky, The Children of the Sun, 323- 
24. 

Goschen, Sir E., 208, 209; work of 
the Legation, 214-15, 225. 

Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 142, 147-48 ; 
verses published 1894, 148 ; 
friendship, 151 ; literary dis- 
cussions, 155-57, 185; praise of 
the Hon. Maurice Baring, 157 ; 
in Copenhagen, 209 ; Hypo- 
lympia, 209. 

Got, art of, 51, 230. 

Gotha, school at, 130-31. 

Gounod, Faust, 136. 

Grace, 19, 37. 

Graham, 106. 

Grain, Corney, 17. 

Grand d'Hauteville, at Eton, 114. 

Granier, Jeanne, in Amants, 166. 

Granville, Lady, 26. 

— Lord, 62. 
Grassina, village, 159. 

Gray, Lady Georgiana, 58-59. 

— Elegy, 18. 

Great Western Railway, Swindon 

works, 76. 
Greece, Sarah Bernhardt on, 217 ; 

visits to, 254. 

— King of, 225. 

Greek Church, Paris, 187. 

— School, San Stefano, cholera hos- 

pital, 421-29. 

— traders in Kharbin, 275. 
Green, Mr. Nathaniel, 22. 

— C. A., 149. 
Greffuhle, Madame, 199. 
Grevin, Musee, 92. 
Grey, Lady de, 60. 



Grey, Lady Georgiana, 58-59. 

Grisi, 52. 

Grosvenor House parties, 54. 

Guatemala, 180. 

Guadarelli, Guidarello, statue at 

Ravenna, 302. 
Guildhall concerts, 27. 
Guitry in Amants, 166. 
Gunchuling, 312. 
Gunter, A. C, That Frenchman, 

106. 
Gurko, Colonel, 283. 
Gurre, Holger Drachman, 210-11. 
Gymnase, Paris, 93, 265. 
Gymnasium, Hildesheim, 120-21. 

H. B., 195. 

Haggard, Rider, 105, 107, 155. 

Haichen Station, 281-82. 

Hale, Mr. Badger, 97. 

Halevy, 199 ; L 'Abbe' Constantin, 106. 

Half-hours in the Far South, 75- 

Halifax, Lord, 88. 

Halle, Sir Charles, 62. 

Hamilton, Leslie, 1 16. 

— war correspondent, 269. 

Hamlet, review in North Street Gazette, 
392-93 ; Sarah Bernhardt's, 231, 

233. 239-41- 
Hammonet, M., 114. 
Hampton Court residences, 58. 
Hands, Charles, 275-76. 
Hanover, 118. 
Harben, at Eton, 98. 
Harbin, 275, 293. 
Harbord family, 59. 
Hardinge, Arthur, 191. 
Hardy, Thomas, 126; works,' 146; 

Tess of the TJ' Urbervilles, 1 48. 
Hare, Sir John, art of, 51, 157 ; in 

The Colonel, 53 ; in A Fair of 

Spectacles, 310. 
Harland, Henry, 155. 

— The Yellow Book, 157. 
Harriet, housemaid, 27. 
Harris (Uncle Willie), 34. 
Harz Mountains, 128, 175. 
Hasse, Hildesheim, 121, 129. 
Hatchards, 20. 

Hatfield, garden-parties, 178. 
Hauptmann, Lonley Lives, 266. 
Hawthorne, Julian, Airs. Gains- 

borough's Diamonds, 106. 
Haymaking near Moscow, 349-51. 
Haymarket Theatre, 53 ; Captain 

Swift, 107. 
Hearts of Men {The), 260. 
Hedda Gabler, Ibsen, 210-11. 



INDEX 



447 



Heidelberg, 4, 133, 135, 163-64; view 
of the Castle, 124 ; the Uni- 
versity, 124-26. 

Heine, Heinrich, 119, 156, 172, 228. 

Hele, M., 86. 

Heligoland, cession, 173. 

Hems, Mr. Harry, 40. 

Hengler's Circus, 17. 

Henley, 148. 

— Antony, at Oxford, 170-72. 
Hennings, Fru, in the Doll's House, 

210-11. 
Henry, Mile Ida, 12-13. 
Herbert, Auberon, at Oxford, 170, 

176 ; experiences, 284-85. 

— Aubrey, 402. 

— First Secretary, Copenhagen, 215. 

— Michael, 212 ; in Paris, 181, 183 ; 

personality, 190-92. 
H^redias, poems, 255. 
Hermann and Dorothea, 1 26. 
Hernani, 35, 229. 
Hervieu, Paul, 199. 
Herz, at Eton, 103. 
Hetherington, Grace, maid, 2, 8. 
Heygate, Mr., 87, 96. 
Heywood-Lonsdale, 88. 
Hildesheim, life at, 1 18-31, 135, 153- 

161, 172. 
Hildesheim, pamphlet by the Hon. 

Maurice Baring, 195. 
Hillier, Arthur Cecil, 149. 
Hilly, nurse, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 37, 39, 

41. 
Hliebnikov, officer, 289, 290-91, 300. 
Hobbes, John Oliver, 147, 149. 
Hofteater Theatre, Karlsruhe, 216, 
Holberg, comedies, 2IO. 
Holywell, Oxford, 170. 
Hook, poem by, 50. 
Hope, schoolfellow, 70. 
Horace, Odes, 100, 259. 
Houghton, Lord, 1 10. 
Hound of Heaven, Thompson, 150. 
House Debating Society, Eton, 113. 
Houses in South Russia, 386-87. 
Houssaye, Henry, 199. 
Hua, M., 97, 114; Eton, 87; Le 

Cercle des Dtfbats, 113. 
Hugo, Victor, 230, 233, 242-43 ; 

Angelo, 21, 305 ; his tomb, 92 ; 

Ruy Bias, 1 14 ; " La Chanson 

d'Eviradnus," 237-39. 
Humanists' Library, 261. 
Hunter, Mrs. Charles, 139. 
Huret, Jules, or Sarah Bernhardt, 217- 

218. 
Hurstmonceaux, 83. 



Ibsen, The Doll's House, 136-37, 210, 

309 ; Hedda G abler, 210 ; 

Ghosts, 323. 
Ida, Mile, 15, 21-22, 26, 66. 
Idiot ( The), Dostoievsky, 293. 
Ihne, Professor, at Hildesheim, 124- 

26, 133. 135. 163-64, 173. 
Illustrated London News, 148. 
Impey, Mr., 107. 
Indomitable, the, 395. 
Inerste River, the, 129. 
International Law, examination in, 

207. 
Invalides, the, 92. 
Iphegenie auf Tauris, 126. 
Iphigenie, Racine, 228. 
Irkutsk, the journey to, 269-72, 314. 
Irving, Sir Henry, art of, 24, 51-52 ; 

as Becket, 310. 
Italian language learned at Florence, 

140. 

— Opera, appreciation of, 52. 
Italy, childish impressions, 38-39. 
Ito, Marquis, 273. 

Ivan the Little Fool, Russian story, 

272-73. 
Ivan the Terrible, 310. 
Ivan Veliki, Cathedral of, 335. 
Ivanov, Tchekhov, 265. 
Ivy Bridge, 31, 41. 

Jagow, Herr, 248. 

James, Henry, 147-49 '■> The Tragic 

Muse, 22S. 
Jane Eyre, 105. 
Janiculum, the, 259. 
Janotha, Mile, 24. 
Japan, Russian policy, 261-62 ; the 

attack on Port Arthur, 263. 
Jardin d'Acclimatation, 92. 
Jaucourt, Francoise de, 206. 

— Madame de, 205-6. 

— Monsieur de, 21, 82-83, 194, 205-6. 

— Pierre de, 82, 84. 
Jen-tsen-Tung, 312-14. 

Jerome, J. K., 381 ; Paul Clever, 324. 

lessen, M. de, 275, 277. 

Jews, discussions concerning, 354-55 ; 

Count Witte and the, 367-68 ; 

pogroms, 389-90. 
Joachim, 55. 

John, Father, of Kronstadt, 325. 
John Inglesanl, 50. 
Johnson, Dr. 127, 213 ; Lives of the 

Poets, 185-86 ; opinions of, 

252-53. 

— Lionel, 149-50. 
Johnstone, Sir Alan, 209, 215. 



[ 4 8 



INDEX 



Joiefait peur (La), 189. 
Journal, the, Ludovic Naudeau, corres- 
pondent, 276. 
Jowett, ijuoted, 364. 
Joynes, Jimmy, 89. 
jubilee year festivities, 85. 
Jump, Mr., 22. 
Jusserand, M., 208. 
Justinian, Palace of, 398. 

Kadets, the, 332 ; opening of the 
Duma, 340-41 ; Count Witte 
and the, 367-68. 

Kalnikoff, General M., 414-15. 

Kama River, the, 374. 

Karlovna, Marie, 347-48. 

Karlsruhe, 216. 

Kasten's Hotel, Hanover, 118. 

Kazan, 374-75. 

Kettles' Lane Papers, III. 

Keats, 4, 5, no, 140, 235, 246. 

Keeley, Mrs., 51. 

Kendal, Mr. and Mrs., 28. 

— Mrs., art of, 51, 310-n ; in The 
Ironmaster, 53 ; in The Likeness 
of the Night, 310. 

Kenmare river, 85. 

Kerensky, 341. 

Kershaw at Balliol, 176. 

Kharbin, 274-75, 3". 3 r 4- 

Kharkov, 386. 

Kholodovsky, General, 275. 

Khovantincha, 310. 

Kiev, 388. 

Kilkov, Prince, 315. 

Killarney, 85. 

King Lear, 163. 

King Solomon's Alines, 107. 

Kingsley, Charles, Westward Ho ! 
106. 

Kipling, 152; popularity of, 126,200; 
parody on, 144 ; publications 
1891-92, 148 ; The Gate of the 
Hundred Sorrows, 309. 

Kirsanov, 222, 314. 

Kislitsky, Lieutenant, 283, 287-91, 
295-96, 299, 302, 313. 

Knagenhjelm, M. de, 209. 

Kneipe, entertainment, 125-26, 129, 

133. 161. 
Kologrivo, village, 345. 
Kongelige Theatre, Copenhagen, 210- 

211. 
Kotz, Marie Karlovna von, 263-64, 

325. 32S. 
Kousnetsk, 315. 

Kovolievsky, Professor, 3^0, 342. 
Kraus, Mile, 92. 



Kremlin, Moscow, 334-36, Nijni- 
Novgorod, 371 ; Kazan, 374. 

Kronstadt, disorders at, 359-60. 

Krumbacher, Professor, 254, 256. 

Kuan-chen-tse, 293. 

Kuhn, Mr. Otto, 124. 

Kumanovo, battle of, 407, 412-16. 

Kuprulu, 414. 

Kuroki, his turning move, 291. 

Kuropatkin, General, 274, 2S0, 287, 
312. 

Kursk, 352, 385. 

Kutchuk, Tchekmedche, 419. 

Labiehe, La Grammaire, 43. 

Labour meeting at Terrioki, 345-47. 

Lady Windermere's Tan, Wilde, 148. 

Lamb, Charles, 145. 

Lambton, Claud, 48. 

Lamsdorff, Count, 273. 

Lane, Mr. John, 151. 

Lang, Andrew, writings, 148 ; and the 

Dreyfusards, 197. 
Langtry, Mrs., 25. 
Lansdowne, Lady, 62. 

— Lord, 62, 

Last Abbot of Glastonbury ( The), 71. 

Latude, escape, 93. 

Lays of Ancient Rome, 158, 167. 

Leavenworth Case (The), 74. 

Lee, Vernon, 141, 147, 256, 259, 370 ; 
Belcaro, 20 ; a saying of, 142 ; 
and the earthquake, 160 ; home 
of, 167 ; on Wagner, 1S6-87. 

Lee-Hamilton, Eugene, 167. 

Legouve, 305. 

Leigh, R. Austen, 91, 144. 

Leighton, Sir Frederick, 55. 

Leighton's in Windsor, 95. 

Leipzig, 133 ; an incident at, 154. 

Lemaitre, J ules, 199 ; on Duse's A/agda, 
210; on Sarah Bernhardt, 227, 
23 1 . 233-34 ; Les AW*, 233 ; on 
Duse in La Dame aux Camelias, 
235 ; on Rostand, 242. 

Lemerre, publisher, 194-95. 

Una, 232. 

Lenin, 341. 

Leno, Dan, 245. 

Lenotre, 168. 

Leo xiii., Pope, 253. 

Leopardi, 140. 

Lermontov, 365 ; "The Demon," 295. 

Lewes, Life of Goethe, 126. 

Liao-he, the, 374. 

Liaoyang, 282, 286 ; the Hotel In- 
ternational, 280. 

— battle of, 2S7-92. 



INDEX 



449 



Liberty, 7. 

Lido, the, 141. 

Lieskov, 294. 

Life's Handicap, Kipling, 148. 

Likeness of the Night (The), 310. 

Limfa, 256. 

Linevitch, General, 311. 

Livre de Mon Ami, France, 156-57. 

"Lira," musical instrument, 387-88. 

Lisle, Lecomte de, 203. 

Lister, Reginald, reminiscences, 182- 
83, 194 ; personality, 188-90. 

Liszt, the Erlkonig, 211. 

Little Russians, 371-72, 386 et seq. 

Littre, 117. 

Locandiera (La), Goldoni, 308. 

Lohengrin, 153. 

Lokal Anzeiger, 276. 

London Library, II. 

Lonely Tree Hill, 298-99, 302. 

Longman's Magazine, 148. 

Lord of the Isles, 91. 

Lords, the Eton Eleven at, 1 15-16. 

Lorelei, rocks of the, 133. 

Lorenzaccio, 231, 233 ; Sarah Bern- 
hardt in, 233-34. 

Loti, Pierre, 137 ; parody on, 194- 
95 ; attack on the Serbiana, 
411. 

Louvre, 92 ; Mona Lisa, 67 ; Gattrie 
d'Apollon, 67. 

Low Mass in Notre Dame, 199. 

Lowther, Lady, 404. 

Lucas Stanley, music shop of, 12. 

Ludwig, Herr, 13. 

Luxmore, Mr., at Eton, 1 16-17. 

Luxor, 169. 

Lyall, Edna, 105. 

Lyceum Theatre, La Tosca, 107-8. 

Lycidas, 161. 

Lynton, 197-98. 

Lyttelton, Edward, at Eton, 104. 

Lytton, Bulwer, Harold, 75 ; Last 
Days of Pompeii, 1 06. 

M'Cullagh, 292. 

Afacmil/ati's Afagazine, essay sent to, 
142. 

Macready, 51. 

Madeleine, the, 187. 

Mademoiselle de Belle-Lsle, 229. 

Maeterlinck, 232. 

Magazin du Louvre, 67. 

Magda, Mrs. Patrick Campbell in, 
167 ; Sarah Bernhardt and 
Duse compared in, 233-35, 2 4 2 > 
.309- 

Magpie Debating Society, 143, 

29 



Maisy, coachman, 26. 

Maitre Guirin, 93. 

Malcolm, at Eton, 90. 

Malinovsky, 283, 287. 

Mallet, Sir Edward, in Berlin, 136; 
his "Villa White," 166-67. 

Malten, 134. 

Mamonov, 316, 329-30. 

Manchuria, 31 1, 363. 

— Station, 274. 

Manege, the, Moscow, Easter festivi- 
ties, 335-36. 

Mannheim, 133. 

Mantle, maid, 18. 

Many Inventions, Kipling, 148. 

Marcello, 185. 

Marie Feodorovna, Empress, 348. 

Marindin, 105. 

Mario, 52. 

Maritch, Alexander, 412-413. 

Marlborough House parties, 24-25, 
80-81. 

Marmora, Sea of, 419. 

" Marseillaise," the, in Moscow, 320. 

Maskeleyne and Cook, 17. 

Mason, Mrs., 25. 

Materna, 134. 

Maubant, 230. 

Maupassant, Guy de, 141, 155, 343; 
Bottle de Suif, 317. 

Maxe, Admiral, 195. 

Mayfly, the, ill. 

Mayo, village, 6. 

Medd, Cubby, 170. 

Meistersinger, 133-34, 1 86. 

Membland, life at, 6, 8, 14, 31-42, 58- 
62, 75, 135, 137 ; lines on 
Christmas at, by Godfrey Webb, 
42-43; "my path," 55-56 
visitors to, 62 ; the organ, S6 
visit of Willie Coventry, 112 
Christmas 1890, 1 13; good-bye 
to, 177. 

Memnon, temple, 169. 

Men I Have Met, Jessen, 276. 

Mendes, Catulle, La Vierge d'Avilon, 
217, 

Mensur, the, Heidelberg, 127-28. 

Meredith, 126, 148. 

Merimee, 141. 

Merrymount Press, Boston, 261. 

Metternich, 202, 204. 

Mevvstone, the, 40. 

Michel Strogoff, 92. 

Mickehenko, General, 292. 

Middlemarch, 267. 

Mikado, at Frankfort, 133 ; in Moscow, 
265. 



45o 



INDEX 



Mildmay, boys at Eton, 88. 

— Mr. F. B., i. 

— Mrs. Bingham (Aunt Georgie), 33- 

34. 59-6o. 
Milioukov, deputy, 340. 
Millard, 276. 
Milton, 162, 163 ; Lycidas, 112 ; 

Paradise Lost, 118, 127. 

— at Eton, 87, 89. 
Mint, a visit to the, 76. 
Mirski, Prince, 386-87. 
Mitre, a dinner at the, 176. 
Modern Egypt, Lord Cromer, 168-69. 
Moe-tung, village, 290. 

Moliere, 210, 230; L'Avare, 114. 
Mona Lisa, the, 67. 
Monde on Von s'ennuie (Le), 92. 
Mongolia, borders of, 313 ; singing in, 

35 1 - 

Monro, Harold, stories of, 332-33. 

Monson, Sir Edmund, in Paris, 181— 
84 ; personality, 190. 

Montagu House, 176. 

Monte Carlo, 166-67. 

Monte Cristo, 96, 105. 

Montesquiou, Robert de, 199 ; on 
L'Aiglon, 203-4. 

Montgomery, Mr. Alfred, 15. 

Montmartre, 197. 

Moonstone ( The), 74. 

Moore, George, 147, 149, 155. 

Moreau, 232. 

Moritzberg. the, 119. 

Morley, John, Compromise, 381. 

Morning Post, the Hon. Maurice 
Baring correspondent in Man- 
churia, 268-304 ; Whigham 
correspondence, 275 ; Mr. 
Baring's dramatic criticisms, 
305 ; Mr. Baring correspondent 
in Moscow, 332 ; in St. Peters- 
burg, 356, 381 ; and in Turkey, 

. 395- 

Morris, Lewis, Epic of Hades, 98. 

Morsh, Mr., Eton, 102. 

Moscow, the Kremlin, 224, 334 ; 
TestofF s restaurant, 224 ; life 
in, 263-64 ; the Art Theatre, 
265-66, 323-24 ; train journey 
from Pensa, 318-19; the Hotel 
Dresden, 319-20, 329 ; the 
Emperor's manifesto read, 319— 
20 ; the Metropole Restaurant, 
320, 323 ; Bauman's funeral, 
321-22 ; the University, 322 ; 
the Riding School, 322 ; the 
Black Gang, 322-23 ; events of 
December 1905, 324, 328-29 ; 



Nikolayev Railway Station, 329, 

331 ; Riask Station, 331 ; rooms 

of the Hon. M. Baring, 332 ; 

Easter festivities, 334~39 ; 

markets, 338-39 ; the journey 

to, 363-64. 
Muscow, River, 336, 350. 
Mothecombe Bay, 59. 
"Mothecombe" House, 59-60. 
Mottl, conductor, 134, 153, 168, 216. 
Mounts Bay, 85. 
Mozart, 52, 186, 2IO. 
Moiley, Mr., Eton, 103. 
Mukden, 292, 304, 362, 410 ; Chinese 

of, 275-76 ; life in, 277-80. 
Mukden Nichevo, the, 279. 
Munkebjerg, 209. 
Musset, Alfred de, 184 ; tomb of, 94 ; 

On ne badine pas avec F Amour, 

67 ; Fantasio, 216 ; Lorenzaccio, 

233- 

Nagasaki, 273. 

Nan-chin-tsa village, 298. 

Naples, 141, 254. 

Napoleon 11., 202-3. 

National Observer, Henley's verse, 

148. 
National Review, articles by the Hon. 

Maurice Baring, 261. 
Naudeau, Ludovici, 276. 
Nazerenko, deputy, 342-43. 
Nebogatov, Admiral, 349. 
Neckar, the, 374 ; view of the hills, 

124. 
Neckarsteinar, 120. 
Neilsen, 52. 
Nemi, lake of, 259. 
Nencioni, Professor, praise of the Hon. 

Maurice Baring, 160. 
Neruda, Madame, 24, 28, 42, 43, 54, 

55, 62. 
Nevill, Lady Dorothy, 15. 
New Forest, 79. 
New Statesman 1921, 147. 
Nezu Witness ( The), editors, 395. 
New York World, 276. 
Newton Ferrers, 39. 
Newton village, 6. 
Newton Wood, 43. 
Nichols, Harry, 24, 83. 
Nick, Heir, 119, 131. 
Nietzsche, 187. 
Nijni-Novgorod, 369 ; the fair at, 371— 

73- 
Nile, the, 374 ; a journey up, 169. 
Nish, 408-10; military hospital at, 

416-17. 



INDEX 



45i 



Norman Tower, Windsor, no, 114, 

117, 124. 
Normandy Hotel, 91. 
North Street Gazette ( The), 390-95. 
Northcourt Nonsense, by the Hon. 

Maurice Baring, 142. 
Noss Mayo, 6 ; building of the church, 

34. 39-40. 
Notorious Airs. Ebbsmith, 157-58, 310. 
Notre Dame des Victoires, 92, 199. 
Nozzi di Figaro, 211. 
Nuremberg, 133. 

Ober-Forster, Frau, 131. 

Odeon Theatre, the, 228. 

Odette, Sardou, 305 ; Duse in, 309. 

Odyssey, Virgil, 100. 

Ohnet, Georges, La Grande Manicre, 

92 ; style, 151. 
Ole, Dane, at the Legation, 209, 214. 
Olympia, 254. 
Olympus, Mount, 404. 
"One Oak," house of Miss Ethel 

Smyth, 140. 
"Onkel Adolph," 119, 129, 131, 135, 

216. 
Opera Boufle, 324. 

— Comique, 93. 
Oppidans, the, 65. 
Organ-building at Charles Street and 

Membland, 86. 
Osborne, the, 224, 225. 
Othello, 163 ; Dr. Timme on, 127. 
Otrante, Charlie d', 216. 
Otway, Mrs., Ascot, 69. 
Ourousoff, Princess, 248. 
Ours, at the Haymarket, 53. 
Ousley, 114. 
Owl {The), 147. 
Oxford, Smalls at, 141 ; rooms at King 

Edward Street, 170-72. 

Paderewski, 211. 

Paget, Miss Violet. See Lee Vernon. 

Paillard, Madame, 66. 

— Therese, 66. 
Paine, Harry, 64. 

Pair of Spectacles {A), 310. 

Palatine, the, 259. 

Pall Mall Gazette, 149. 

Pamflete, the Bulteels' house, 34, 58- 

59- 

Panshanger, 167. 
Pantheon, Paris, 92. 
Papal Guard, the, 253. 
Parachute, in, 144. 
Paradis des Enfants, 67. 
Paradise Lost, 138. 



Paris, childish impressions, 33, 36 ; 
visits, 66-67, 9*-94> x 66, 236; 
the Embassy, 180-207 ; exhibi- 
tion of 1900, 199, 204; Jardin 
d'Acclimatation, 204-5. 

Paris, Archbishop of, 92. 

Parker, Alexander, 65. 

Paros, 256. 

Parratt, Sir Walter, 103. 

Parry, Hubert, 1 14. 

Parsifal, 134, 153-54. 

Parthenon, the, 254-55. 

Pasca in La joie fait peur, 53. 

Pasolini, Count, 248-49. 

— Countess, 248-49, 256. 

Passant {Le), Coppee, 228. 

Pater, 137. 

Patmore, Coventry, "Ode," 193. 

Patti, 26-27, 52. 

Pechom, Robert, epitaph, 199. 

Pekin, 275, 277. 

Pelleas tt Mdlisande, 305 . 

Pensa, 317, 318. 

Pera, the Little Club, 397-98, 420. 

Pere Lachaise, tombs, 94. 

Pere Prodi gue {Le), 140. 

Perlepe, battle of, 416. 

Perrin, M., 229. 

Persimmon, 167. 

Perugia, 158. 

Peter, Danish servant, 225. 

Pcterhof, 342. 

Petrukin, deputy, 344-45. 

Phedias, 255. 

Phedre, Sarah Bernhardt in, 227, 229, 

2 3 J . 2 33> 2 43> 3°5- 
Philemonov, Colonel, 283, 287-304 

passim. 
Philip, Mr., of the U.S.A. Embassy, 

420-29. 
Phillimore, at Ascot, 75-76. 
Piatti, Signor, 24, 55. 
Pickwick, reading of, 74. 
Pierson, acting of, 93. 
Pieterbourski Listok, the, 362 . 
Pincio, the, 246, 257. 
Pinero, The Hobby Horse, 53 ; Second 

Mrs. Tanqueray, 1 48, 309. 
Piraeus, 256. 

Pitt Club, Cambridge, 153. 
Pius ix., Pope, 38. 
Planchette writing, 143, 
Plarr, Victor, 149. 
Plaitner Story, Wells, 170. 
Plehve, M., 36S. 
Ploetz, M., 109. 
Plutus, 142. 
Plymouth, 40, 41, 45. 



452 



INDEX 



Plympton, 41. 
Poe, Edgar Allan, 112. 
Pogroms, 3S9-90. 

Ponsonby, Betty, 35, 54, 65, 88, no, 
112. 

— the Hon. Arthur, 65 \ at Eton, 88 ; 

in Berlin, 135-37- 

— the Hon. Henry, 35, 65, 88, 124, 

138 ; announces result of the 
Prince Consort prize, 1 14—15. 

— Frederick, 101. 

— John, 65, 88. 

— Maggie, 88. 

— Mrs., 35, 52, 65, 88, 112, 114. 
Pope, quoted, 201. ' 
Popoff, Nicholas, 277. 

Porte Saint Martin Theatre, 92. 

Porter, Mr., 97-98. 

Porteuse de Pain (La) ; Zaiupa, 93. 

Portia, Shakespeare's, 163. 

Potapoff, Colonel, 275-76. 

Potemkin, 339. 

Potsdam, 129. 

Pourtales, Madame de, 193-94. 

Poutilov, General, 298-99. 

Princesse Lointaine, 243. 

Prison ( The), Brewster, 250, 252. 

Proces de Jeanne d' 'Arc (Le), 233. 

Prophete (Le), 92. 

Prudhomme, Sully, article on, by the 

Hon. Maurice Baring, 226. 
Punch, the " Hornets," 171. 
Pushkin, 248 ; prose stories, 257. 
Pygmalion and Galatea, 54. 
Pyke-Nott, S3. 
Pyramids, the, 169. 

Quiller-Couch, 149. 

Quincey, De, " Our Lady of Sorrows," 
309. 

R.Y.S. Club, 45. 

Rachel, 52 ; genius of, 227-28. 

Racine, 203, 228, 230 ; Be'n'nice, 192- 
93 ; resuscitated by Sarah Bern- 
hardt, 243. 

Radcliffe's (House), Eton, 88. 

Radford, Ernest, 149. 

Ralli, boy, at Tatham's, 143. 

Ram Head, 40. 

Ramsay, at Cambridge, 146. 

— editor of the Mayfly, ill. 
Rashleigh, at Eton, 89-90. 
Rawlins, Mr., 104. 
Rawlinson, 29. 

Reade, Charles, Foul Play, 106. 
Reading Biscuit Factory, 76. 



Real Gymnasium, the, Hildesheim, 

119-20, 128-29. 
Recouly, of the Temps, 276. 
Reed, German, 17. 
Reform Club, 147. 
Regattas, 44~45- 
Regnier, M. Henri de, on parodies by 

the Hon. Maurice Baring, 194- 

J 95- 
Reichemberg, acting of, 92, 230. 
Rejane, in Zaza, 197 ; as Nora, 210. 
" Rekrutskaya," 408. 
Renaissance theatre, 92, 233, 242. 
Renan, parody on, 194-95. 
Rennes verdict, the, 196-97. 
Residenz Theater, 136. 
Reske, Jean de, 52, 92. 
Retvizan, torpedoed, 263. 
Revelstoke Church, 36, 40. 

— Lady, 15, 16, 22, 27, 37, 39 ; and 

Madame Neruda, 28 ; yacht- 
ing, 45 ; chess-playing, 47-48 ; 
Schiller's "Die Glocke," 50- 
51 ; and the opera, 52-53 ; at 
Stafford House, 54-55 ; a panto- 
mime, 63-64 ; Contrexeville, 
66 ; the Ascot school, 68-69 > 
the first half-term report, 73- 
75 ; school incidents, j6, 80- 
81 ; Ascot races, 79-80 ; 
the Eastbourne school, 84 ; the 
organ at Charles Street, 86 ; her 
son's confirmation, 101 ; the 
financial crisis, 113 ; visits to 
Eton, 114; and the Prince 
Consort Prize, 115 ; death, 135. 

— Lord, 14, 27, 47, 130, 157; appre- 

ciation of acting, 24, 51-53, 63- 
64 ; yachting, 44 ; versatility of, 
50-51 ; gifts of, 55-56; bigness 
of his character, 56-57 : Con- 
trexeville, 65-66 ; at Cowes, 85 ; 
the financial crisis, 1 13; death, 

177- 

Reves de Margtierite (Les), 86. 

Revue Bleu, 234. 

Rhodes, 256. 

Rhymers' Club, 147-48; Book of the 

Rhymers' Club, 147, 149, 150; 

Second Book of the Rhymers' 

Club, 147, 150. 
Rhys, Ernest, 149. 
Riazan Station, 318. 
Riazhk, 318. 
Ribinsk, 368, 369. 
Ries, Mr., 12, 24. 
Ristori, Madame, 227, 245-46. 
Ritchie children, the, 180. 



INDEX 



453 



Ritz Hotel, Sarah Bernhardt at the, 

237-39- 
Robe Rouge (La), 197. 
Robert Macaire, 93. 
Roberts, Arthur, 8. 
Robertson, Sir Forbes, 239. 
Roche, M., on the Hon. Maurice 

Baring's essay, 177. 
Rod, Edouard, 184, 195. 

— Sir Rennell, 245. 
Roe, Mr., 34. 

Roebuck shooting in South Russia, 
388-89. 

Rots (Les), Lemaitre, 233. 

Rolleston, T. W., 149. 

Roman de la Rose (Le), 143, 152. 

Romanesques (Les), 233. 

Rome, life at the Embassy, 245, 259- 
60 ; Appian Way, 246 ; Cam- 
pagna, 246, 258-59 ; Palazzo 
Sciarra, 248 ; Palazzo Antici 
Mattei, 249-50 ; expeditions, 
256 ; the Pincio, 257 ; Villa 
d'Este, 258-59 ; Tivoli, 259. 

Romney Weir, 117. 

Ronconi, 52. 

Rose, Mile, of the petit s chevaux, 66. 

Rossetti, 112, 139, 170. 

— Christina, 148. 
Rossini, 52. 

Rostand, M., L'Aiglon, 199-204; Les 
Romanesques, 232-33 ; Samari- 
taine, 233 ; the creation of 
Sarah Bernhardt, 242. 

— Madame, 204. 
Rothschild chateau, 205. 
Rotten Row, 25. 
Roublot, M., 98. 
Rowland, sock-shop, 95. 
Rubini, 52. 

Rudel, Geoffroy, 244. 

Rundreise, 133. 

Runnymede, 114. 

Ruskin, 381 ; The King of the Golden 

River, 20 ; Arthur Benson and, 

112. 
Russell, Bertram, 145. 

— Claud, 166, 168-70. 

— Miss Katie, 62. 

— Miss Maud, 62. 

Russia, dark nights in Central, 4 ; the 
October manifesto, 212 ; the 
journey to, 218-19, 261 ; life 
among the intelligentsia, 264- 
65 ; the State- paid theatres, 
265 ; constitutional government 
promised, 319 ; beginning of the 
Revolution, 332 et seq. ; the 



Empress at Peterhof, 342 ; the 
people and the priests, 354-55 ; 
effect of M. Stolypin's policy, 
357-58 ; the second Duma, 367 ; 
the beggars of, 377 ; South 
Russia, 386-90 ; the third 
Duma, 390 ; books on Russian 
matters, 395 ; pilgrims from, in 
Constantinople, 400-1 ; the 
fascination of, 430 et seq. 

Russkoe Slovo, the, 349. 

Ruy Bias, Hugo, 228, 243. 

St. George's School, Ascot, 68-81. 

St. James's Hall concerts, 23-24, 139. 

St. James's Theatre, A Scrap of Paper, 
28 ; Mr. Hare at the, 53 ; Mrs. 
Kendal's acting, 310-11. 

St. John Lateran, church of, 1 99. 

St. Michael's Mount, 85. 

St. Peter's, 246, 259-60 ; Holy Week 
ceremonies, 253. 

St. Petersburg, 269, 311, 324; the 
Winter Palace, 263 ; Art 
Theatre, 266 ; opening of the 
Duma, 339-41 : journey from 
Moscow, 352-55 ; a journey 
down the Volga, 368. 

St. Sophia, Constantinople, 398. 

Saint Victor, M. Castillon de, 204. 

St. Vincent's School, Eastbourne, 82. 

Sainte Beuve, 117. 

Sainte Chapelle, 92. 

Sainte Genevieve, 92. 

Salisbury, Lord, foreign policy, 166, 

173. I78-79- 
Salle, M, Georges La, 269. 
Samara, 314, 315, 375, 378. 
Samaritaine (La), 243. 
Samary, acting of, 92. 
Samsonoff, General, 280. 
San Marino, Duchess of, 38. 
San Stefano, the cholera at, 419-29. 
Sand, George, 235. 
Sanderson, Lord, 179-80. 
Santley, Sir Charles, 24, 27. 
Sappho, "Ode to Aphrodite," 256. 
Saratov, features, 375, 378. 
Sarcey, on Sarah Bernhardt, 228-29 ; 

on Racine, 243. 
Sardou, 141, 199; Pattes de Mouche, 

28 ; Belle Maman, 93 ; plays 

of, 231, 233 ; Pe'dora, 305, 309 ; 

Odette, 305, 309. 
Saturday Review, 158, 195 ; articles 

by the Hon. Maurice Baring, 

261. 
Sazonoff, M., 247-48. 



454 



INDEX 



Scenes from Country Life, 267. 

Schauspielhaus, the, 136. 

Scheidemantel, 134. 

Scheider, Madame, at San Stefano, 
421-22, 424-29. 

Schiller, 126-27; "Die Glocke," 50- 
51 ; Wallensteiri" 's Tod, 120 ; 
Brant von Messina, 128 ; com- 
pared with Shakespeare, 163 ; 
and Goethe, 164 ; quoted, 382. 

Schliemann, Dr., 112. 

Schon, M., 208. 

School, at the Haymarket, 53. 

Schools, Russian evening, 326-29. 

Schubert, " Der Liermann," 388. 

Schultzen, Fraulein, 131. 

Schumann, Clara, 335. 

Schwartz, Lieut, von, 276. 

Schwerin, boy, 128. 

Scoones, Mr., establishment of, 154- 
56, 167-69. 

Scott, Herbert, 88, 89. 

— Sir Charles, 263. 

— Sir Walter, 49, 53, 112. 

Scribe and Legouve, Adrienne Lecou- 

vreur, 308-9. 
Scyra, 256. 

Seagull, Tchekhov, 265-66. 
Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Pinero, 148, 

3°9- 

Sedan, 196. 

Servia, occupation of Uskub, 414-16 ; 
patriotism, 416-17; Bulgarian 
and Servian language compared, 
411-12. 

Seven Summers, Carr-Bosanquet, 144. 

Sforza, Catherine, 248. 

Sha-ho river, battle of the, 297-303. 

Shakespeare, German cult of, 126-27 ; 
and Schiller, 163 ; in Copen- 
hagen, 210; Brewster on the 
production of, 251-52 ; Julius 
desar in Moscow, 266 ; Naza- 
renko's opinion of, 343 ; Sonnets 
of, 365. 

Shaw, Mr. Bernard, on Mrs. Campbell s 
acting, 157-58 ; Dramatic Opin- 
ions and Essays, 234 ; on Mrs. 
Kendal's acting, 311. 

She, 107. 

She Stoops to Conquer, 83. 

Shelley, no, 140, 186; Arthur Benson 
and, 112; reputation, 126; 
Adonais, 161, 163 ; grave in 
Rome, 246. 

Shelton, Mr., 83. 

Sheppy, housekeeper, 9, 27-28, 81. 

Shorthouse, 105. 



Shuvaloff, Countess, 263. 

Sichkhov, General, 283. 

Siddons, Mrs., 227. 

Simpson of the Daily Telegraph, 276. 

Singing, Russian, 273-74, 351, 432-33- 

Sin-min-tin, 292. 

Sixtine Chapel, Mass in the, 253. 

Skat, card game, 124, 131. ""• 

Slap's band, 176. 

Sleuthhound, cutter, 45. 

Slough, 84. 

Smielo, 38S-89. 

Smith, George, 113. 

— Sidney, 30. 

Smyth, Dr., on Tosti's art, 61. 

— General, 139. 

— Miss Ethel, her Mass at the Albert 

Hall, 138-39; songs, 139-40; 

in Copenhagen, 215 ; Fantasio, 

216. 
Sofia, 417 ; the railway station, 409- 

10. 
Somotka, 382. 

" Song of the Scug (The)," III. 
Sophy, or the Adventures of a Savage, 

Violet Fane, 245. 
So-shan-tse hill, 287-90. 
Sosnofka, visits to, 218-24, 260, 382, 

438. 
Sothern, Sam, 51. 
Souris (La), 86. 
South African War, 236-37. 
Speaker, the, 147, 149; the Hon. 

Maurice Baring's article on 

L'Aiglon, 200-3. 
Spencer, Herbert, works, 343. 

— Lady Sarah, 68-69. 

— Robert, 15, 135. 
Spring-Rice, Cecil, 191, 263, 324. 
Stackelberg, General, 288, 292. 
Stafford House parties, 54-55, 74. 
Stamboul, 397-400, 411. 
Standard, the, 304. 
Stanislavsky, M., 265, 323. 
Stanley, Arthur, 171. 

— Miss Maude, 62. 
Steamers of the Volga, 375-76. 
Stephen, J. K., poem by, in ; at 

Eton, 112. 
Stevenson, R. L., 53, 105-7, 137, 

185 ; Ebb Tide, 148 ; saying of, 

quoted, 437-38. 
Stewart, at Eton, 89. 
Stolypin, M., 332 ; and Russia's 

future, 341-42; policy of, 356— 

57 ; Count Witte on, 368. 
"Stop-shorts," 313. 
Story-tellers, Russian, 272-73. 



INDEX 



455 



Strong, Arthur, and the Dreyfus case, 

185-86; on L'Aiglon, 204. 
Studd, at Eton, 103-4. 
Students' Humour {The), III. 
Stump Debating Society, 143. 
Sturmer, Miss Van, 22. 
Sucher, Rose, 134. 
Sudermann, Die Ehre, 136 ; Jl/agda, 

233- 
Sully, Mounet, 92, 230. 
Sunflower season in Russia, 381-82. 
Sunium, 255. 
Surley, 95. 
Sveaborg, 362. 
Swinburne, 126, 137, 139, 170, 232; 

Eton "Ode," 102, 114; 

Atalanta in Calydon, 1 12 ; 

Aslrophel, 148 ; opinions on, 

155 ; Towett and, 364. 
Switzerland, appreciation, 130. 
Sylvie and Bruno, 1 80. 
Symons, Arthur, 147-49, r 55- 

Tauchnitz, Baron, 154, 370. 

Taurid palace, meeting of the Duma 

in, 339-40. 
Taglioni, Madame, 26. 
Taine, 186 ; Voyage aux Pyrenees, 

114; article on, by M. Barry, 

226. 
Takmakov, officer, 297. 
Talaat Bey, 398. 
Tambov, 380-81. 
Tamburini, 52. 

Tannhauser, 120, 134, 153, 162. 
Tarver, Lily, 142. 

— Mr. Frank, 99. 
Tashichiao, battlefield of, 280-81. 
lasso, 126. 

Tatham, Mr., 142-43. 
Tchataldja, 419. 

Tchekov, tomb of, 264 ; plays of, 265- 
68. 

— Uncle Vania, 269 ; Chaika, 323. 
Tchelabinsk, 352-53. 
Tea-drinking in Russia, 350. 

Temple Bar, poem by the Hon. 

Maurice Baring, 113. 
Temple, Bishop, 40. 
Temps, the, 276. 
Tennyson, no, 126, 148, 150; "May 

Queen," 56. 
Terrioki, Labour meeting at, 345-47. 
Terry, Ellen, art of, 24, 52, 56 ; as 

Beatrice, 310. 
Tess of the D 1 Urbervilles, Hardy, 14S. 
Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 1 12. 
Thaler s, reckoning by, 129. 



"The Game," 161-63. 

The Greatest of These, 310. 

Theatre Antoine, 197. 

Theatre francais, 36, 53, 92, 93, 140, 

192 ; Sarah Bernhardt's con- 
nection with, 228-31. 
Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, 187. 
Thekla, Schiller's, 163. 
Theodora, Sardou, 231. 
Thompson, Francis, The Hound of 

Heaven, 150. 
Thompson, Mr., 39. 
Thoughts on Art and Life, Leonardo 

da Vinci, 260-61. 
Tillet, M. J. de, 234. 
Times (The), 115, 127, 163, 247, 418 ; 

the Hon. Maurice Baring and, 

395- 
Timme, Dr., house of, 1 18-19, 124, 

128-32, 135, 154, 160-61, 172- 

73 ; on the English poets, 126- 

72 ; death, 176. 
Todhunter, John, 149. 
Todten-Insel, 256. 
Tolstoy, 137, 219, 235,248; War and 

Peace, 168 ; Powers of Darkness, 

210 ; Nazarenko's opinion of, 

343- 
— Alexis, Tropar, 257-58. 
Toole, art of, 51. 
Toombs, Mr., carpenter, 7-8. 
Tosca (La), Sarah Bernhardt in, 107-8, 

231-32. 
Tosti, art of, 61. 
Toula, 315. 

Tourgenev, 219, 248, 259. 
Tovey, Donald, at Balliol, 171-72, 180. 
Transbaikalian railway, 311. 
Trans-Siberian railway, experiences, 

277>3I4- 
Traverso, Madame, 140, 156-59. 
Treasure Island, 50, 74. 
Trebelli, 52. 
Tree as Svengali, 310. 
Trepov, General, 341, 355. 
Tresco, 85. 

Trevelyan, Robert, 145. 
Trevi, 259. 
Trianon, 206. 
Triolets, 142-43. 
Tristan und Isolda, 134 
Trollope, 48. 

Tropar, Alexis Tolstoy, 257-58. 
True Cross, a relic of the, 38. 
Tsaritsina, near Moscow, 347, 378, 

380-81. 
Tudgay, Mrs., 38-39, 42, 62. 
Turgeniev, 431. 



45<5 



INDEX 



Turkish character, 425-27. 

— Red Crescent, 422, 427-28 ; British 

unit, 427-28. 
Turkey, Revolution of May 1909, 395, 

397-98- 
Turin, 169. 
Tusini, Mile, 66. 
Tver, 368. 
Twain, Mark, in German, 223. 

Unbearable Bassington ( The), 333. 

Uncle Vania, Tchekhov, 266-69. 

Ushitai, town of, 312. 

Uskub, 407, 410, 411 ; Serbian oc- 
cupation, 412-17, Hotel de la 
Liberie, 413. 

Vandal, Albert, 199. 

Vandyk in Lohengrin, 153. 

Vardar river, the, 413. 

Vassili, coachman, 326. 

Vaudeville, the Paris, 265. 

Vaughan, Kate, 24. 

Vaux, chateau of, 206. 

Venice, 141 ; nights in, 4. 

Verdi, 52; Otello, 120. 

Verlaine, Paul, 139; poetry of, 184; 

Brewster on, 250-51. 
Verne, Jules, 49 ; Michael Strogoff, 

220. 
Verrall, Dr., on Boileau, 152 ; stories 

by, 152-53- 

Versailles, 92, 153, 198. 

Vesuvius Mount, 167. 

Viatka, 358. 

Victoria, Queen, 8 ; Jubilee, 85, 176 ; 
opens New Schools at Eton, 
108 ; bestows the Prince Consort 
prize on the Hon. Maurice 
Baring, I r 4- 1 5 ; a story of 
Prince Albert and, 131 ; funeral 
procession, 215-16. 

Vieux Paris (Le), reconstruction of, 

93- 
Vigny, Alfred de, 203 ; Cinq Mars, 

114. 
Villa Felseck, 124-25. 
Vinci, Leonardo da, Thoughts on Art 

and Life, 260-61. 
" Vindt," game of, 374, 387. 
Virginia water, 76. 
Visits de Noces (La), Duse in, 308. 
Vogt, Heinrich (Tristan), 134. 
Vogue, Melchoir de, 195. 
Volga, ajourney down the, 368 ; aspect 

beyond Nijni, 374 ; towns of the 

Upper, 378-79- 
Vologda, a journey to, 358-66. 



Voltaire, Zaire, 229. 
Voronezh, 401. 
Vranja, 412. 

Wagner, 52, 133-35 ? Tannhduser, 

120; Arthur Strong on, 186; 

Vernon Lee on, 186-87 j in 

Copenhagen, 210. 
Wagram, battle of, 202. 
Waldorf Theatre, Duse at the, 305. 
Wales, Prince of (Edward vn.), 

marriage, 25 ; in Paris, 193. 

— Princess, 24-25, parties at Marl- 

borough House, 54-55, 80. 

Walkley, Mr., 149 ; on Sarah Bern- 
hardt, 232-33. 

Wallace, Lew, Ben Hur, 106. 

Wallington, 38. 

War and Peace, Tolstoy, 168. 

Ward, Arnold, 170; at Eton, III; 
Arthur Benson and, 112. 

— Mrs. Humphry, III ; Robert 

Els mere, 106 ; David Grieve, 

148. 
Warre, Dr., at Eton, 14, 46, 81, 99. 
Warsaw, 218-19. 
Wasp, steam launch, 45. 
Waterlooville, home of Cherie, 114. 
Watertuitch, the yacht, 44-45, 85. 
Watson, Mr., butler, 27. 

— William, poems, 147-48, 157. 
Watteau, at the Louvre, 67. 
Watts, exhibitions, 56. 

Webb, (jodfrey, 62 ; lines on Christ- 
mas at Membland, 42-43. 

Wells, Mr. H. G., History of the 
World, 47 ; Piatt tier Story, 170 ; 
Food of the Gods, 285. 

Westn acott, Lady, 427. 

Westn.inster Abbey, underground pass- 
age to, 390. 

Westminster Gazette, 333. 

Westwater, Dr., 280, 282. 

When we Dead Awaken, 211. 

When William Came, 333. 

Whigham, correspondent, 275. 

Whyte-Melville, 48, 106. 

Wibley, Charles, 148. 

Wigans, the, 51- 

Wilde, Oscar, 324 ; Lady Winder- 
mere's Fan, 14S. 

Wildenbruch, Count, 208. 

Williams, stationer, Eton, 95, 117. 

Wilton, Marie (Mrs. Bancroft), 53. 

Winchester match, the, 112. 

Windsor, Norman Tower, 65, 87-88 ; 
shops, 95 ; St. George's Chapel, 
103. 



INDEX 



457 



Wippern, Eric, 161, 175, 311. 

— Hans, 132-33, 161. 
Witchcraft, in Moscow, 349-50. 
Witte, Count, 332 ; interview with, 367. 
Wood, Charlie, 88. 

— Francis, 88. 
Wordsworth, 186. 
Worms, 93. 

Worthington, schoolfellow, 70, 79. 
Wrest, 167-68. 
Wyndham, Mr. Percy, 62. 

— Mrs. Percy, 62. 

Yantai, battle of, 295-96. 
Yapsley, Mr., 40. 
Yaroslav, journey to, 363-64, 370. 
Yashville, Prince, 389. 



Yealm River, 6, 39, 44. 

Yealmpton, 34. 

Yeats, W. B., 149-50. 

Yellow Book {The), 147; article on 

Anatole France by the Hon. 

Maurice Baring, 157. 
Yonge, Miss, 49. 

York, Duke of, at Hildesheim, 135. 
Young Turk Party, 397-98. 

Zacchoni, actor, 311. 
Zacharoff, General, 311-12. 
Zaire, Voltaire, 229. 
Zaza, 197. 
Zerbini, 24. 
Zhilkin, M., 346. 
Zola, 163, 343. 



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